Journey to the Savage Planet Review (Shooter__Andy)
Please keep in mind, the rating here is as close to "neutral" as it can get, but since I couldn't bring myself to finish this game, I can't really recommend it either.
Journey to the Savage Planet is a first-person action-platformer with Metroidvania approach to level design and environmental "puzzles". Oh, and also it's a comedy game. So it has a lot of elements in it, but, unfortunately, it executes none of them well enough to actually make the game as a whole fun.
The action consists of just two things (well, not really, but more on that later): your melee kick/slap and a plasma pistol. The latter can be upgraded to have a charged shot and, later, a bounce charged shot, but it doesn't work like you'd think it would: you can only charge your shot once per minute or so, which means that during most combats you can't rely on that, especially since it also takes time that you could otherwise spend shooting and concentration (since you have to hit the button at the right time, or it will fail and lock your pistol for a few seconds) that you should otherwise spend dodging. Oh, and speaking of dodging, there are basically just a couple of enemy types that should be dodged, and both of them are extremely inconsistent with the timing of their attacks and can sometimes, but not always, track your dodges. The rest either die in one hit so you should just be faster than them, or are too slow to not just use normal running.
The "puzzles" aren't really puzzles as much as just Metroidvania-type stuff where you need a certain thing to progress past a certain obstacle. Unfortunately, there are multiple problems here, all stemming from very odd game design decisions:
1) There is no map. There are no markers. If you've encountered something you couldn't get past, good luck remembering about it several hours later when you finally get the required item.
2) Most of the things that allow you to pass the obstacles, except your jetpack and your grapple beam, are thrown consumables, which you have to find and collect to use. This is baffling to me, since there isn't really any sort of challenge there, it's just wasting your time to go and collect some more.
3) I guess for some of them the reason is that they can be used as weapons (bombs, acid bombs, electricity fruits), but your basic gun is better for any normal combat (since it's much faster and easier to use), and the only time you'd really want to use them is against enemies who are immune to your gun until you break their defense with one of those, so it's still less of a "weapon" and more of a "thing you need to actually progress".
However, even when you have everything you need to get past any puzzle/obstacle, that's when you actually start realizing how annoying and unrewarding exploration really is.
I've already mentioned that there is no map. What makes navigation an even bigger problem, however, is that the "levels" start to have more and more confusing layouts as you go on. You start on a sort of hill-ish ice plane with a couple of caves, then move on to a warm area with huge height difference between its parts, and by the end of the game you're navigating a series of floating islands. Even as someone who will defend Xen in Half-Life, this was just too much.
Then there's the fact that you really get nothing for actually trying to explore after some point. The gear upgrades have some that you clearly want to get, and some that you just get because there's nothing else left, so you don't really care about getting more resources for those, and the only other thing that you can find (bar some incredibly unfunny text logs) are your health/stamina upgrades, but guess what: way before you collect all 100 of them, your health and stamina hit their caps, so there's really absolutely no point in doing that after I think about 50?
Lastly, again, as someone who defends first-person platforming, you have to put extra care into it, and this game doesn't. The precise point I've quit at was when I was faced with a puzzle where I had to charge my jumps to go through a moving gap in the ceiling while the floor below was moving as well... several times in a row... and later the gaps also had lasers in them.
But then again, you can play as a dog.