gameplay journey to the savage planet

Journey to the Savage Planet review

Ex ubi veterans take us on a tongue-in-cheek adventure., our verdict.

Funny, fresh, and full of surprises, Typhoon’s debut blends genres expertly. Co-op doesn’t add much, though.

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What is it? A survival-metroidvania hybrid with jokes. Expect to pay $30/£24, Epic Games Store Developer Typhoon Studios Publisher Epic Games Reviewed on i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAM Multiplayer 2-player co-op Link s avageplanetgame.com

Given that it looks so much like No Man’s Sky at a glance and it’s made by former Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson’s new studio, perhaps it’s best to start with which games Journey to the Savage Planet is not like. 

Although you and a co-op partner find yourself in a raucously colourful distant planet scanning its local life forms and scavenging raw materials for crafting, it isn’t anything like as non-linear or as vast as No Man’s Sky. And sure, there’s a gun occupying the bottom-right of the screen, but Far Cry In Space it is not. What Typhoon Studios have made with their debut title is something else. 

Something that gives you a real sense of being stranded in a huge and uncharted alien environment, but carefully curates your path through it. That path takes you through platforming sequences, boss battles, mob fights and environmental puzzles and often calls upon you to double back and use a new bit of kit in an old area to access previously out of reach places. It does all this while regularly making me laugh along with its story beats, and making me care about its central mystery: if the planet’s supposedly bereft of intelligent life, what’s that enormous tower doing right in the middle of it?

It’s a comedy-metroidvania-survival-shooter-platformer, then, a kind of Subnautica among the stars with extra bells and whistles. As a Kindred Aerospace employee shot out into the farthest reaches of who-knows-where to chart the planet and see if there’s anything worth the company’s time, you find yourself in a pickle when - stop me if you’ve heard this one - your spacecraft’s damaged during landing. A voyage of discovery’s required to survive and source the parts needed to fuel your journey back home. 

A simplistic enough setup which does the heavy lifting needed to contextualise your scrabbling for aluminium and feeding indeterminate nutritional paste to small birds in order to collect their carbon-rich poop. But it has real life breathed into it by the outright silliness of JTTSP’s writing. 

Humour’s famously subjective, and perhaps your own experiences of the comedy here will be like watching a friend do karaoke while you’re mid-dental examination, but I doubt it. Pitch-perfect live action commercials for sci-fi gubbins punctuate your forays into the planet, aping the frothing sales pitches of ‘80s toy commercials and instructional videos, and I grew to actively look forward to Kindred CEO Martin Tweed’s next video communication with me. Even the behaviour of the loading bar on your vessel’s computer got me. Really. A funny loading bar.

The game might even be hoist on its own petard here because when it’s played in co-op, it’s easy to let your Discord bantz drown out the jokes, or to race ahead without stopping to appreciate the details. In fact, this may actually work better as a solo game all-round. So much of your progress is about making sense of the area’s topography and figuring out how to manipulate the flora and fauna so you can delve deeper into it, and if you’re lost alone you only have the problem of finding your way again. If two of you are lost in different locations, a lot of your time’s spent first trying to figure out exactly where each of you is lost, /then/ finding the critical path. I’m certainly not complaining that co-op’s available, but rather recommending a more antisocial approach if you feel knee-deep in the progress treacle with a friend. 

It’s an interesting mix of aggressive wildlife, cutesy fauna and joyously weird scenery that entices you deeper once you’re outside the safety of your crashed ship, and JTTSP plays on this deviously. Pufferbirds, the first sentient beings you encounter, are at least 50% eyeball and their trusting coos are impossible not to find endearing. In a purely mechanical sense, they exist to produce carbon when you feed them Grob. Grob is a purple-ish canned food paste that tastes, according to its promotional materials, anywhere between beef, lamb spleen poutine and cucumber shitwater, but that’s by the by. 

What’s more pertinent is that if you overfeed Pufferbirds in your quest for carbon, they simply pop. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but I can’t tell you how wracked with guilt I felt upon that discovery. Worse, the only way I found to make it past a Meat Vortex (think organic waste disposal) was to lure those wide-eyed, innocent Pufferbirds into vortex-sucking range and continue along the path while they were being eviscerated. You beastly devils, Typhoon Studios.

Very little of the plants and creatures around you is there just to fill the space, and there’s a mild puzzle element to almost everything with a pulse. The bee-like critters who plague your progress at the base of the tower can all be killed in one fell swoop by shooting their hive, while the amber shields on some enemies can be corroded by the acidic fruit of Blight Bomb plants. 

There’s always a reason to pay attention to your surroundings here, one that goes beyond the game just looking nice. Although let’s take a second to appreciate that yes, it does look very nice. Remember when indies looked generations behind triple-A releases? Or, you know, gave some indication that they weren’t made by a team of 1000 people with millions of dollars to spend? The detail on small items and variety of idle animations to its fauna is matched by its knack for pulling together a gorgeous vista with a painter’s eye for framing in just about any direction. 

The irony is that the closer you come to fuelling your ship and starting the journey back home, the more bewitching your current climate becomes. The simple rules of each biome - use Grapple seeds to scale the Cliffs of Mt. Gzarfyn, double-jump between the mushroom pads of the Fungi of Si’ned VII, lob Blight Bombs in the Matriarch’s Lair - become a kind of second nature that roots you to the place and turns a once totally alien landscape into something fondly familiar. It’s not doing something radical in its own right, but the blend of established genres and mechanics at the heart of Journey to the Savage Planet are still expertly chosen and blended together like a muso’s mixtape.

Phil 'the face' Iwaniuk used to work in magazines. Now he wanders the earth, stopping passers-by to tell them about PC games he remembers from 1998 until their polite smiles turn cold. He also makes ads. Veteran hardware smasher and game botherer of PC Format, Official PlayStation Magazine, PCGamesN, Guardian, Eurogamer, IGN, VG247, and What Gramophone? He won an award once, but he doesn't like to go on about it.

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Journey To The Savage Planet Review - A Pulpy Sci-Fi Romp

• First Released Jan 28, 2020 released

Lighthearted exploration on a not-so-savage planet.

By Richard Wakeling on January 28, 2020 at 5:43PM PST

Journey to the Savage Planet is a fantastic name for a pulpy sci-fi game, but is a bit of a misdirect when taken at face value. A "savage planet" conjures up thoughts of hostility and survival, tapping into the inherent dangers of life on the frontiers of space. Sure, there are things that want to kill you in Journey to the Savage Planet, but they're only a minor inconvenience rather than the main focus. Instead, developer Typhoon Studios places the emphasis on exploration, coupling this with genuine humour and a charming tone to present a lighthearted and singularly focused chunk of sci-fi adventuring.

The entire game takes place on a single planet located deep in uncharted space. You're strapped into the space boots of an employee of Kindred Aerospace--a rinky-dink outfit that's so proud of its standing as the fourth-best interstellar exploration company, it'll make you shudder to think of how bad the fifth-best must be. Once your feet touch the planet's surface, you'll begin to catalog the flora, fauna, and life located across the various biomes of planet AR-Y 26 to determine if it's fit for human habitation, what with the whole climate change thing ruining Earth.

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Now Playing: Journey To The Savage Planet Video Review

Journey to the Savage Planet excels when it comes to the assortment of tools and equipment you can gradually craft and use to reach every nook and cranny of the planet's surface. You're immediately free to explore as you see fit, but it doesn't take long to discover plenty of inaccessible areas. As such, much of the game is spent scanning the flora and fauna to reveal whether they have gameplay benefits or are just there to contribute to the planet's vibrant and colorful aesthetic. Some plants may contain seeds that restore your health or produce projectile explosives, while most of the planet's hodgepodge glossary of alien critters are filled with resources you can gather if you're heartless enough to put a laser blast between their eyes. Gathering these resources and locating items that can be reverse-engineered using your ship's 3D printer allows you to craft equipment like grappling hooks, double-jump upgrades for your jetpack, and other tools that make traversal and deeper exploration possible.

The whole game latches onto this palpable sense of momentum, as each new upgrade opens up more of the planet for you to probe. Your feet may be firmly planted on the ground in its opening stages, but by the end of the 10-hour adventure you'll be gliding across natural ziplines hundreds of feet in the air, propelling across perilous chasms with a triple jump, and using a powerful ground pound to unearth new passages. Journey to the Savage Planet adopts the classic Metroidvania formula and executes it wonderfully, presenting you with an ever-growing arsenal of tools that are satisfying to use and feed into the game's inherent focus on exploration.

Of course, the other side of this equation is the planet itself, which is well worth turning inside out. AR-Y 26 is split into three distinct biomes. Each one is moderately sized, resulting in the planet's scale feeling manageable and allowing you to explore freely without fear of getting lost. When presented with multiple paths, it's easy to choose one over the other because you know getting back to that initial fork in the road is going to be relatively easy. This encourages you to poke your nose in every crevice, travel to every far-away cave, and check behind every waterfall. You're often rewarded for doing so, with extra resources or important upgrade items hidden throughout the planet--not to mention the visual treats that are on offer in each disparate biome, whether you're navigating through the craggy icy caves and glaciers your ship landed on, walking amongst the overgrown pink and turquoise mushrooms of the Fungi of Si'ned VII, or jumping between the floating islands of The Elevated Realm.

Journey to the Savage Planet isn't a completely leisurely tour, though. Your first order of business is to develop a futuristic blaster pistol, but combat is a means to an end rather than a major part of the game, and it ends up being a drag. While most of the planet's creatures are docile, there are outliers that become hostile as soon as they spot you. Defeating these aggressive predators involves a rinse and repeat pattern whereby you use a nifty sidestep or jump to avoid an attack before following up by shooting one or multiple weak points. There are only slight deviations on this back-and-forth that require you to lob an explosive or poison cloud at the enemy before you can pepper its weak spot. The pistol never feels quite accurate enough for the job, especially because you're usually being asked to hit small targets, and each of the combat's faults comes to a head during the game's closing moments as you're thrown into one fight after another before facing off against the final boss.

You can play the whole game cooperatively with a friend, which does make combat slightly more bearable, but co-op doesn't alter the moment-to-moment gameplay in any significant way. Conflicts are easier with two people, sure, but there's nothing about the co-op experience that's intrinsically built for more than a single player. You can explore the planet together or opt to split up and cover different ground, but that's about it.

Playing with a friend can result in moments of emergent humour, but Journey to the Savage Planet is also genuinely funny due to the abundance of FMVs located on your ship. These short and incredibly eccentric videos mock and parody everything from exploitative corporate practises to the video game industry. There's a commercial for a new game elegantly titled MOBA MOBA MOBA Mobile VR V.17 Golden Fleece; its main selling point is having more microtransactions than any other game, with one of its features being an in-game "Custo-mi$er" for your created character. The humour is somewhat frontloaded, but this does help the game's irreverent charm establish itself early.

Journey to the Savage Planet borrows plenty of familiar elements from other games, yet it does so in a carefree way that sets it apart from other sci-fi exploration games, settling on a relaxing playstyle that's informed by its single, vivid planet and tightly focused design. It only takes a couple of hours to reveal its humdrum combat, but this is the only significant damper on what is an entertaining slice of lighthearted planetary exploration.

• Leave Blank
• Exploring the planet isn't overwhelming, and it's full of worthwhile things to discover
• The Metroidvania structure and constant flow of upgrades means you're always progressing
• Absurd humor is genuinely funny and quickly establishes a charming tone
• Combat is by-the-numbers and quickly descends into tedium

About the Author

Richard Wakeling

• @richardwakeling

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Derailed: Wild Quest 12+

Travel to survive‪‬, screenshots, description.

Craft your own destiny as you embark on an epic journey through a world ravaged by the apocalypse In this action packed adventure game, you control the fate of humanity from the helm of your trusty locomotive. You’ll be wise to remember the only rule here is survival and every decision you make could be the difference between life and death. As a global explorer, you'll gather precious resources, complete daring quests, and battle ferocious enemies in your quest to become a hero that this planet so desperately needs. But fear not! You won't be alone on this odyssey. Hire companions who will join your train adventure, lending their unique skills to aid in your fight for survival. Join forces to discover new locations and search for ways to save the little planet that remains. Together, you'll navigate through treacherous terrain, defend against savage threats, and uncover the secrets hidden within this wrecked world. Will you rise to the challenge and become the saviour of your own world, or will you succumb to the danger that lies ahead and let it fall to inevitable destruction? The choice is yours in this ultimate adventure! Derailed Features: - All Aboard! : Hop into your own locomotive as you travel through the post-apocalyptic landscape. - Location Exploration: Unlock and explore new locations as you uncover valuable resources along the way. - Resource Gathering: Scavenge for essential resources to keep your train and companions running in the unforgiving wilderness. - Exciting Quests: Challenge yourself with new quests each with its own rewards and consequences. - Find Companions: Recruit companions to join you on your journey, each with their own skills to help you along the way.

Version 1.0.13

Get back on track with bug fixes and improvements in Derailed today!

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Composing the Trial Chambers

Meet the musicians behind the 1.21 Update soundtrack!

What melody captures the moment of meeting a breeze for the first time? And what does successfully navigating a trap-filled trial chamber sound like?

Take a musical journey into the trial chambers and listen to the Tricky Trials album on your favorite streaming platform – today! In fact, why not listen along as we speak to the three composers behind these beautiful tracks : Kumi Tanioka, Lena Raine, and Aaron Cherof to understand what composing for a game like Minecraft is like, what inspired them, what challenged them, and more!

A musical journey into the trial chambers 

Trial chambers are a very special feature of the Tricky Trials Update not just because they’re full of traps, tricks, and treasure; but because each trial chamber you find will have a different layout, different mobs to do battle with, and different challenges to face!  

“Keeping the trial chambers in mind framed my entire composition process. Especially “Deeper”, which felt like a piece closely tied to my visualization of the trial chambers: new colors, materials, and a sense of intentional design in an otherwise chaotic space.” – Lena Raine

Lena Raine is no stranger to challenges. Having gained her degree in composition, Lena struggled to break into music, and instead focused her early career on her love of game design. Later, she was able to combine her passions for composing and video games by writing the music for Celeste. Since then, she’s composed music for several video games, including Minecraft! Composing for the Tricky Trials Update proved a little challenging for Lena, too as she wanted to do something she’d not tried before: 

“I was determined to try out some new sounds for “Deeper”, but nothing I did seemed to work. I spent two days recording, but I didn't like where it was going. So I made the radical decision to scrap everything and start again (which was really tough after 2 days of work!) What I ended up with, however, ended up becoming one of my favorite tracks. “Deeper” isn’t as dark as some of the Nether tracks, but it speaks to a slightly darker side of the Overworld, and evokes a feeling of constrained darkness.” Lena Raine

Aaron Cherof , who has been composing for games for fifteen years and worked on the soundtrack for the Trails & Tales Update, used darkness in a different way in his composition process – by creating one of his tracks while sleeping. This is a level of multitasking I can only dream of – and even then it doesn’t happen!  

I’ve been composing for a long time, but having a musical idea come to me in a dream is something that’s only happened twice in my entire life! “Watcher” had been rattling around unfinished in my head for a while, so it spent a lot more time “in the oven” than my typical songs. Working on this update was the inspiration I’d needed to give “Watcher” form, and finish it! It’s pretty magical to hear it out in the world after being trapped in my head for so long!” – Aaron Cherof

Kumi Tanioka worked at Square Enix until 2009 before going freelance, and now as well as composing music for a variety of games (including Minecraft!) she publishes her own original albums, and performs her music live. For Kumi, the challenge of creating music for the Tricky Trials soundtrack was all about trying to find a perfect balance, not just for her but for Minecraft fans who create their own worlds within the game.

“I never want to destroy the world that Minecraft fans have in their minds, and I also want to express my own feelings in the music, too. Finding the balance between how far to go and where to restrain myself while also making Minecraft fans happy was difficult!” Kumi Tanioka

A Chorus of New Challenges 

"I hope players can enjoy a feeling of nostalgia even when listening to songs they’ve never heard before as they embark on an adventure through the unknown." - Aaron Cherof

I’ve never thought of myself as a competent combat player, but for this update I’m determined to give the trial chambers my best shot, and clasp my blocky hands around one of the smashing new weapons: the mace! Of course it’ll probably take me hundreds of attempts and lots of broken armor, but you know what they say! If at first you don’t succeed, run away screaming try, try again. 

Kumi Tanioka tried something new in her composition process, too – to surprising ends!

“For the first time,  I used an instrument called aquarion  [a glass xylophone]. I love the sound of the piano, so I really wanted to use its tone, but I had been struggling to express something new with only the piano. Then I heard the aquarion, and the instrument really resonated with me. I immediately thought of a motif for a Minecraft song! Another track, “pokopoko”,  includes a new sound that we created using a bamboo instrument . It’s a simple but warm tone, and it allowed me to approach the world of Minecraft from a different perspective.” Kumi Tanioka

I think I might try and learn from Kumi, and approach the trial chambers from a different perspective, too. Perhaps the breeze just wants to be my friend? And if that’s the case, then maybe I shouldn’t thwack it with a sword? Sure, befriending the breeze wouldn’t be a conventional way of trying to get a trial key, but according to Lena Raine sometimes breaking with convention is sometimes a good thing.

“There are a lot of composers playing with microtonal compositions, or breaking from western tonality. As a composer who primarily works within conventional harmony, I've always wanted to try writing less "normal"-sounding music, and I played a lot with a sense of tuning in the second half of 'Endless'. I wanted to toy with the perception of tonality (which instrument feels out of tune with which?) and was pleasantly surprised by the result!” – Lena Raine

Unexpected Surprises

The mace is one of the new weapons coming as part of the 1.21 Update!

Aaron Cherof understands the trepidation and excitement of approaching a new challenge. When composing the track for one of the music discs, breaking new ground dirt blocks was something really important to him. 

“Without spoiling it for players who haven’t discovered it yet, the music disc was really exciting, as well as being unknown territory for me. My goal was to write something that hadn’t been explored musically within the world of Minecraft before. Inspired by some of my favorite music, I tried to filter that through a different lens. In the end, I hope the music disc track can also inspire players to try venturing into unfamiliar waters on their own creative journeys!” Aaron Cherof

Consider me inspired, Aaron! On top of claiming the mace and befriending the breeze, I’ll now be going on a hunt for the music discs included in this update so I can bring the feeling of the trial chambers home with me, starting with the wonder you feel when you first uncover that rectangular structure deep underground. This quiet sense of amazement is something Kumi Tanioka wanted to preserve in her compositions, too: 

“These songs are for listeners who love the Minecraft universe, who love Minecraft music, and while of course you can listen to my songs separately as a soundtrack, I hope that you will take some time to listen to my music while playing. I wrote my songs in the hope that players who are on a journey inside Minecraft will not wake up from that dream world. On the contrary, I hope the music will help them immerse themselves in their Minecraft world even further, and enjoy it even more.” - Kumi Tanioka

Hypnotizing melodies 

Kumi Tanioka’s music is so dreamy that I can find myself utterly hypnotized while mining for resources (I want all the new decorative blocks coming with the Tricky Trials Update!). Of course mindless mining can be a little dangerous in the trial chambers, especially if you stumble across a trial spawner! Then things get tense really quickly , something Lena Raine has tried to weave into her music.

“One of my favorite things to do in ambient music is to have this sense of tension bursting at the seams. I put some explosive processing on a track, while holding it back with gating, only letting it out occasionally. This creates a wonderful sense of tension where suddenly an unexpected 'scream' comes from the synth before it ducks down again, giving you an uncertain surprise!” Aaron Cherof

This update is filled with surprises , from the breeze’s wind charges triggering everything from switches to tripwires, to the way enemies scale based on the size of your adventuring party! Aaron Cherof dropped a few surprises into his compositions too, in celebration of Minecraft turning a very big number: 

“ It’s Minecraft’s 15-year anniversary this year , and I wanted to celebrate that by using mostly minimalistic instrumentation. Piano has always been at the heart of Minecraft music, and many of the songs I wrote for Tricky Trials have piano at their core – along with a few extra surprises along the way for listeners. I hope players can enjoy a feeling of nostalgia even when listening to songs they’ve never heard before as they embark on an adventure through the unknown!” – Aaron Cherof

"I never thought I would be part of building the Minecraft world again, so I feel very honored to have been able to create these three songs." – Kumi Tanioka

What's your favorite track?

Asking a composer to pick their favorite track is a bit like asking me to pick my favorite wolf variation – impossible! But of course I asked them anyway.  

“Of course, I like all three songs because I put my heart and soul into them, but I especially like “ pokopoko ”. In this track I wanted to express a bird's-eye view of the world of Minecraft while delving a little more freely into it. To craft “pokopoko”, I travelled throughout the Overworld, listening to all the great Minecraft music as I explored , and then I imagined the world I wanted to express.” – Kumi Tanioka

"It’s hard to pick a favorite! But I think if I had to narrow it down to one, it’d be “Featherfall”. I love the journey of the song, and the simplicity of the duet between the piano and music box at the heart of it. I fell in love with the melody while writing it, and I think I could live in the coda of the song forever." – Aaron Cherof

“’ Deeper ’ really sticks out for me. Perhaps because it's a bit of a weird one in terms of how I came up with it, because I had to throw away two days’ work and start from scratch! On my second attempt, I started with a glitched-out piano synth which can be heard after the intro, before it goes into the main groove. The way it cuts up the rhythm into different rhythmic groupings was really inspiring to start playing with polyrhythms and build up the mood. I also played with the processing on the synths to create this wonderful sense of tension.” – Lena Raine 

What’s your favorite track of the Tricky Trials album ? Listen to it today on Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen! 

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Setting out on a fantastical journey with a mission, explore the vast world, a rich gaming experience, personalized gameplay, experience intense and thrilling battles firsthand.

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