Journey to the Savage Planet
In Journey to the Savage Planet, you are an employee of the 4th best interstellar space exploration company. The game is light hearted, comical and a bit whacky. The game disguises itself as a metroidvania, but is really more of a linear platformer in disguise. Each area has a final blocking section that you can't progress past without the next upgrade (double jump, bomb seeds etc). Going back to old areas with new abilities might yield collectibles, but they're entirely optional. Art direction, sound and animation are all coherent and pretty, and the voice acting fits in well too, although I started to find it rather grating.
Pros
- Lighthearted voice acting and art style
- Pretty
- Abilities are fun to use, and original. Your main abilities come from various things you find on the planet like grapple seeds (grapple hook points you can throw on certain areas), exploding seeds, blobs of goo that throw enemies in the air etc
- Large variety of creatures and hazards
- You can scan everything
- Lots of interesting little areas to find
Cons
- Too expensive; wait for at least 50% off. It's only 7-8 hours long
- You can't pause. Apparently it has multiplayer but that's no excuse when playing alone
- There are invisible walls everywhere. If your game is about 3D exploration with double jumps and jet packs, don't use invisible walls. Design your levels better.
- The voices, especially of your guiding computer are repetitive and can get annoying
- Started as an Epic Store exclusive
- There are adverts in the game (fictional, not real) that play every time you enter your ship. It's supposed to make you feel part of a cheap low-grade space exploration company but they get really annoying
- You charge your super shot by reloading when you're already fully reloaded. For people who are used to reloading out of habit, this means you regularly accidentally start the charging mini game
- Most of the game progresses at a decent pace, but there's one spot in particular where you have to find 3 crystals to progress, and they're spread over a huge area with no direction. In an 8 hours game, I spent 2 hours searching for the last crystal, hidden on a platform out of site, below the edge of the world