Journey to the Savage Planet

My first hour with Journey to the Savage Planet had me convinced I was playing a budget No Man's Sky clone. By hour three, I'd grapple-hooked across a floating alien spire, scanned a creature described as having "a festering butthole," and watched a live-action fast-food ad featuring a meat grinder full of human limbs. This game knows exactly what it is, and it commits hard. The structure is Metroidvania through and through. The open planet AR-Y26 is technically accessible from the start, but progress gates behind crafted upgrades - the Proton Tether grappling hook, jump thrusters, eventually double and triple jumps - that you unlock by gathering resources and returning to your Javelin ship hub. It follows a familiar loop: hit an obstacle, get redirected by your AI companion EKO to find the right tool, craft it, backtrack. That rhythm is formulaic, but the level design shuffles the challenges enough to keep it fresh for the runtime. The traversal, once you stack up those mobility upgrades, genuinely feels great - snappy, vertical, and satisfying in a way that first-person platformers rarely manage. The tone is the game's sharpest weapon. EKO, a sarcastic AI who treats your probable death as a minor inconvenience, lands closer to GLaDOS than most games trying to pull that off. The in-universe ads from Kindred Aerospace CEO Martin Tweed add a layer of dry corporate satire that runs throughout. Some critics argued the anti-capitalist angle is underbaked - the mechanics you spend your time on are resource extraction and creature killing, which somewhat undercuts the message - but if you read it as a comedy romp rather than a political statement, it holds up throughout. The humor is genuinely funny rather than try-hard, which is a harder bar to clear than it looks. Where things get rougher: combat is the weakest pillar. You get one sidearm with upgradeable fire modes - acid and electric alternate shots open up new area access as well as dealing damage - but enemy encounters never rise above "manageable nuisance." Bosses are serviceable but unmemorable. The game also famously ships with no in-game map, which turns backtracking from a mild inconvenience into a legitimate frustration when you step away for a few days and return disoriented. Death sends you back to ship and requires retrieval of dropped materials, a system that feels punishing relative to the game's otherwise relaxed difficulty. Some players will bounce off all of this. The ones who stay - especially in online co-op - tend to complete it smiling. At 7-10 hours for the main run, it does not overstay its welcome. The Hot Garbage DLC adds a side-planet that most reviewers called decent-but-brief. For players who want a polished, genuinely funny sci-fi adventure that borrows the best parts of Metroid Prime without demanding Metroid Prime skill, this is the clearest recommendation in its genre. Solo it's good; with a friend it consistently gets described as the better version of itself.

Alex · Scout Team

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