Journey to the Savage Planet

Few lessons about exploiting worlds and their resources have been learned by Kindred Aerospace, the company overseeing the exploration of this batty space adventure. But that's kind of the point of Journey to the Savage Planet, which uses a liberal dose of humor to show the folly of our modern society as it's applied in bizarre and immoral ways in the future. This ranges from disgusting products meant to recall Sea Monkeys and spam to thoughtless corporations refusing to provide adequate protection to workers while ordering them to do things that don't feel quite right. Taking on the role of one of these employees (or two, if you choose to play cooperatively with someone else), players go about accomplishing the company's objectives by scanning everything they see and taking what they need from the ecosystem in order to survive and progress. Put more simply, we see clearly some of the absurdities of our modern world in what we are tasked to do on this futuristic, alien planet.

It'd have been nice if the same attention had been paid the action. The combat's fun most of the time, with clever concepts such as enemies that split in two when struck, others that need to be ground pounded from above, or flickering, hard-to-target tails that serve as weak spots. But navigating the world without a map is a pain. And many missions and collectibles require returning multiple times to areas already explored once you have the proper gear to accomplish a specific objective or reach a distant ledge. Making matters worse, one of the key traversal mechanics later in the game -- grappling and sliding on rails -- is a bit janky, with latch points sometimes failing to register a grapple cue while you're in mid-air, resulting in a long fall into a bottomless chasm. Journey to the Savage Planet is smart and entertaining, especially when you're on your ship scrolling through computer files, but what you get up to on the planet's surface could have benefitted from some tweaking.