What Was The Last Game You Played?

[Benjamin_Nevis]

Spent much of the last few evenings on GTA Vice City (Definitive Edition). I've pretty much done the missions now, so mostly just driving about Vice City picking fights with Cops and racing them to the Spray Painters 

[Gaz]

I haven't had much time for any long games recently so I've been playing some of the shorter games available on PS Plus. Finished off Deliver Us The Moon today.

[Tiger Driver]

Recently bought a Nintendo Switch so have been playing that recently. Love how I can choose between playing it on the telly or using it as a handheld. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is an absolute blast! Haven't played a Smash game since Melee on the GameCube and playing Ultimate has brought back some great memories. If anyone has any other Switch game recommendations then hit me up!

[Miguel Sanchez]

Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (PS4, 2017 - originally PS2, 2001)

The last time I played the Jak & Daxter games I waited until I had finished all three before writing them up. I vaguely remember the result feeling condensed, not doing justice to the games or my thoughts on them. On reflection, after finishing the first one and writing this, I don't have a lot to say, but the game has such a special place in my heart I almost feel obligated.

Remember when 3D games were new and exciting? Remember when you only had one camera control scheme and it was completely contrary to what would become the de facto rotation angle twenty years later, making your favourite games of yesteryear a confusingly awkward revisit? Remember when open world games were relatively new, and the notion of seamless travel between levels rather than a hub-world or menu screen felt somehow huge and momentous? Remember when every new game you played seemed to have an anthropomorphic talking mascot? Step forward Jak and Daxter, a mute lad with yellow hair and his best friend who falls into a big pool of Dark Eco and gets turned into an Ottsel, basically a giant orange rat that's a cross between an otter and a weasel. You set out to find Gol and Maia, Sages of the Dark Eco, to turn him back.

I just love this game. Every part of it. The sounds, the characters, the music, the classic platforming and puzzle sections. The two buttons for attacks, the contextual coloured eco you pick up to move faster, attack harder or do ranged attacks. Part of me is surprised that twenty years later I can hear as many sounds and recall as many positive memories from this game as I can, but they're all there. I feel as if the PS4 version of this isn't as graphically slick as the PS3 version, but you'll probably be too busy fighting with the camera to notice. Actually it can be really quite annoying when you're trying to jump from ledge to ledge, or on a moving platform, and you don't move the camera where you think it's going to go, but it's so quick to recover from these you never resent it. Actually if you're trying to attack multiple enemies at once it's even more annoying because the hitboxes don't always end where you think and you only technically have four bits of health you can lose before you have to die and respawn, but you just need to stop being bad at games and start being good.

As one of the PS2's flagship franchises, I think Jak & Daxter always worked because of its characterisation. Daxter is a wacky sidekick who always has a smart response to something, but he's never annoying or childish. He's not mature or adult, he's just... reasonable. And a bit loud. And orange and furry. Considering I'm writing this at a time when the latest God of War timesink is stupefying people, it's worth remembering that engaging, likeable characters can be brief. They show up, their motives are explained, you're left to it. There's enough charm about the world that you just end up naturally liking everyone in it, and wanting to follow the story to resolve everything.

I'm not going to spend too long dwelling on details like the characters or story - as much as I like all of it, I'd always like to see more - but playing an action adventure platformer from the glory days of the PS2 just makes you feel like games like this don't exist now. Just something complete and self-contained. It's a game you can reasonably complete in about two days yet it doesn't feel short, or shallow. The combat is good and varied enough to keep you interested. The platforming works far better than it should given the camera. There are vehicle sections to break it up and add something different. You go through a range of environments and tasks which are brief enough to complete fully at once, but they come quickly enough that you never linger. I like being able to play a game where I feel as if I can see all of it and experience all of it, and the Precursor Legacy is certainly one of those. I get to comprehensively complete a game I love and relive a time when I was young and happy because I had nothing else to care about. Isn't that why we still play games?

[Miguel Sanchez]

Redout (PS4, 2016)

A redout occurs when the body experiences a negative g-force sufficient to cause a blood flow from the lower parts of the body to the head. It is the inverse effect of a greyout, where blood flows away from the head to the lower parts of the body. Usually, a redout will only ever be experienced by pilots, as planes are the most common devices that allow such negative g-forces to be exerted. Redouts are potentially dangerous and can cause retinal damage and hemorrhagic stroke.

I'm glad I looked this up on Wikipedia, because I didn't know that. Redout is also a video game where you race anti-gravity ships round vast, sweeping tracks in exotic, futuristic locations. It's not WipEout so you don't have weapons, or as much detail in any of the graphics, but you have a range of upgradeable ships with different handling characteristics, a range of game modes and eventually you'll regularly exceed speeds of 1,000 miles per hour. 

There's really only two things to judge Redout on - how it plays and how it looks. Unlike various WipEouts or other similar futuristic racers, you really need to use both sticks to properly control your ship. Left stick is steering but with the right stick you can strafe and control the pitch of your craft. If you're going into a loop or over a crest you'll need to lift your ship's nose otherwise it will scrape along the ground, slowing you down and causing damage. The result is a cornering style which relies more on anticipation than anything else. It's a bit strange to get used to at first, but as you work your way up through faster ship classes you should be familiar enough when it really becomes necessary.

The career mode in Redout is huge. In the base game there are five different locations with multiple tracks in each. There are even more game modes - race, race without powerups, time trial, speed, tournaments, "Boss" which combines every track in a single location for a massive lap, and others. If you just work your way through all of them it will take you a long time and you'll never be bored. The best tactic to win races is often to jump into an early lead and just focus on flying as smoothly as possible, but the sheer volume of events and tracks means there's always variety. As you win races and earn money you can buy and upgrade the different ships, and add two powerups at a time which affect your ship's handling. You'll add Magnetic Stabilisers which make the biggest difference to your handling, but the active powerup which you have to activate contextually offers a bit more strategy. I mostly stuck to the starting team's ships and had little problem winning the career events, but the variety is there if you want it.

One other thing to mention about the AI is that the collision physics aren't very good. By that I mean if you're flying and someone touches you, you're going to get spun out and come to a complete stop almost instantly. Restarting a race is easy enough but it's still frustrating playing a racing game where you have to actively avoid the things you're racing against. There are three difficulty settings you can switch between to try and avoid this, but that's never a satisfying way to win.

Like WipEout, there's a decent bit of lore you can find if you go looking. It's some time in the 2550s. Earth isn't doing very well and people live on Mars, or the moons of Jupiter, and Earth is mostly a playground for this anti-gravity racing, which itself is a byproduct of the research and technology that took humanity into the solar system. The tracks go through spectacular locations like Cairo, space, what's left of Italy, and there are three DLC packs (each costing what the base game cost me, I don't know how that works) which add even more. If you go through the menus you can find quite a bit of information about how the racing developed and the teams and the tracks and I love that stuff, it's all very interesting.

Sadly, also like WipEout, not enough is made of this lore. When I played the Omega Collection a few years ago I remember lamenting that WipEout games have always been just... interesting. The teams, the tracks, the drivers, the world that the racing takes place in. Yet it's all just sort of there, and you feel like you actively have to work to feel involved in it. Redout is very similar, only if anything there's less detail. The circuits are complex and varied to race on, but the surrounding environments look quite cartoony compared to the ships and tracks themselves. I'm not expecting photo-realism from a small game made by a small developer, but the environments should be more than they are. If I'm flying through a volcano or going between land and underwater on a space moon, I should be more impressed. It's just that outside of the racing there's little to properly immerse you in a world which is unquestionably very interesting.  It feels like a missed opportunity to me.

I had hesitated about buying Redout for a while. I decided to just go for it in a recent sale and was surprised by how much there was, and how much I enjoyed it. From what I gather the sequel is more and better, so I'll get around to that eventually. Give it a try if you can. 

[Miguel Sanchez]

Jak II: Renegade (PS4, 2017 - originally PS2, 2003)

When I last played Rayman 2 I completed the game 100% in about six hours. That was finishing the story and collecting all 800 Lums. When I first played that in my younger years I remember it taking weeks and feeling like a massive, sprawling odyssey of levels and difficulty and it being the largest, hardest, greatest thing in the world. Taking turns with my friend to try and beat levels, and the nervous release of excitement when I finally realised I was going to beat the final boss. 

Jak II is a similar tale, although slightly embarrassing. I think this is the first open world sandbox game I ever played, and I didn't know how it worked. After escaping prison at the start you have to go to the icon on the map to find your first mission and I didn't know how that worked. I spent a lot of time flying about the opening area of the map and I don't remember what pushed me into the right alleyway to actually start the game. I also remember getting stuck a few missions in, where you had to jump through an obstacle course while being shot at with an awkward camera. I'm not sure if all of this happened before or after I had the strategy guide for the game, but I'll save myself any further embarrassment here and say before.

What did the Jak and Daxter franchise need after the first game - a colourful, humorous, action adventure platformer? It needed the playable character to hit puberty, get a gun and be set in a world which shows the political and social downsides to letting a city's ruler live in a giant palace on the top of a tower in the middle of it. Jak, Daxter, Keira and Samos start the game by going through the big gate they found at the end of The Precursor Legacy. As they do a big head pops out and promises them a very miserable time. Jak and Daxter are promptly captured by some armoured lads with guns, Jak goes to prison and gets pumped full of chemicals. Two years later Daxter breaks him out, hilarity ensues. 

Jak II is still, at its heart, a platformer. The jumping and physical combat controls are just the same. Only now, he has a gun with four eventual different types of ammo, vehicles to fly around Haven City where the game is set and a lots of different types of Metal Heads, the creatures who try and capture the city every now and then, fighting its leader Baron Praxis and his forces over Dark Eco, the energy source they all need. Sometimes missions take you to other locations inside and outside of the city so there's still lots of variety, even though some of your trips outside are surprisingly brief (or briefer than I remember them being when I was younger).

The amount of variety from mission to mission is actually surprisingly high. Even if it probably was inspired heavily by the 3D Grand Theft Autos of the time, the missions aren't all escorts, chases or go into a building and shoot everyone. Actually several of them involve just shooting stuff and often with irritatingly awkward time limits or settings, but you jump from one place to another and one goal to another so often it never feels repetitive. One drawback of playing a game that's twenty years old is its interesting approach to checkpoints which can make certain parts of missions very annoying. Even given its age there's not any defending this. You just need to hope you can get through some places which will definitely annoy you. My total play time was twelve hours so it's not like you're going to be there forever, but it does show its age in places.

Was this Naughty Dog's first game with guns in it? It might have been. Either way, this is a large part of the game's annoyance. You have four different weapon types. The scatter gun is basically a shotgun which does a wide area blast in front of you. Since you often face multiple enemies at a time, this is good. The blaster is a single shot weapon which does as much damage as a scatter blast, and which you can't aim. The game sort of aims for you. I say sort of, sometimes it does and sometimes you'll need to fiddle about with the left stick and hope it hits what you need it to. Eventually you'll just spam jumping, spinning and shooting which fires bullets out in all directions, but this is out of frustration rather than strategy and even though ammo is plentiful, you might end up running out. The vulcan rifle (or something) is up next and this is an automatic version of the blaster which needs time to spool up, and in a game where enemies have four health at most. The gun is a nice idea, but I think some refinement was required. The final weapon type comes too near the end of the game to be worth mentioning, which is a shame because a long range electrified rocket launcher just sounds great.

New to the series is Dark Jak, a result of Jak's time in prison. You can collect Dark Eco from defeated enemies and unleash an extra strong version of Jak with improved physical attacks when you get enough. There are also finishing moves you can unlock which take out all the enemies in an area. It's pretty pointless in all honesty. There are one or two missions where it might be useful, but regular attacks and the guns are always enough. You might need one of the finishing moves if you're really overwhelmed, but that's about it. It's a nice change and has some thematic purpose, but it's not game-defining.

I complained about the health system when I played The Precursor Legacy and at first glance it looks better in Jak II, but it's not. Your health display has eight green bars in it. Virtually every attack you take will take away two of these, so you can still only take four hits before you die and take your chances with the terrible checkpoints. Health pickups aren't consistent either so there will be times you're swimming in them, and times where you're frantically dodge rolling and trying to avoid enemies getting near you. The lack of consistency in stuff like this just feels baffling playing it now. How could someone play this game before it was released and not think this was terrible and needed changed? The dodgy checkpoints were probably the worst part of the game, and they were much worse than I ever remember them being before.

Why I loved this game then, now and probably still will in another twenty years is the atmosphere. Haven City is a dark, bleak hellscape which is advanced enough to have flying cars but still have slums. You can interact with very little of the buildings or... any of the city at all, really, but it still feels vast and expansive because of the different areas. It might be lingering awe from it being the first sandbox I'd seen but I just enjoy moving about the city, hearing the sounds, music and dodging in and out of traffic. The ambience is outstanding, and it's something that not many games do this well.

What I love most about theses games is the Precursors. It's why I loved the first game so much too. This bronze stuff everywhere with strange markings on it that makes otherworldly metallic noises when you touch or interact with it. What is it? Who put it there? Why aren't they there now? Why is it so valuable? Why don't I have a Precursor Orb on my desk? Both Jak games strike the perfect balance of this stuff being ubiquitous but never actually active or explained. You feel familiar with it because you're spending so much time with it, but nobody's actually telling you anything. In Jak II the actual Orbs and artefacts are less significant and frequent but this just increases their sense of intrigue. Once the story really starts focusing on the city's founder, Mar, and his relationship to the Metal Heads, the Precursors and Jak, it's just fantastic stuff.

There are more and more complex characters than in the first game. I probably know all of them too well to analyse them objectively but in addition to the range of missions and gameplay, the characters you meet are are all deep and interesting enough for you to be invested in them. The voice acting is great for all of them too. Daxter maintains his role as the true strength of the game for the same reasons - he's funny, he's wacky, but he's also adult and realistic and somehow not over the top no matter how obnoxiously he shouts. Given my issues with terrible games like The Last of Us and the Uncharteds, it's good to know that yes, once, Naughty Dog could write good characters. 

It's just been announced that Uncharted is getting a reboot. Where is my Jak and Daxter reboot? Surely there's room in the world of video games for an action adventure platformer with a bit of mystery and actual good characters that's going to let a bunch of people relive their childhoods? Give me a fully realised version of Haven City and I'll die happy.

[BFTD]

Back before it was taken off Steam for being an embarrassment, I picked up a copy of Ride to Hell: Retribution for buttons, and I've finally been giving it a go.

It's awful, obviously, but it's interesting because you can see the lines where a more ambitious game was cut down in order to release something, anything, to rake back a bit of the cash spent on development. It shunts you through short, perfunctory missionlets, every part of which has been cropped to stop you noticing where the game was very clearly unfinished - it literally picks you up and dumps you somewhere else when you discover something it doesn't want you to see. By the time I got to the central "hub town" (which you're only allowed to explore a small area of), I noticed three parts of it that had already been used in cut scenes or "missions" (beat up three guys then get back on your bike).

I take it they wanted to include a misguided old-school GTA mechanic where shagging women would provide you with bonuses, so every woman you meet in the game wants to jump you instantly, and they're all busty babes in hot pants. At one point during a sequence of battering f**k out of a few dozen bad dudes, I walked into a room with a man and woman staring at each other; I figured I was supposed to beat this guy up too, so I did and it immediately jumped to a cut scene of our hero dry-humping the woman. Not a word was exchanged between the two. Women in this game literally perform the same function as the health dispensers in Half-Life, only with ammo  

There's a cracking behind-the-scenes book about the making of this just waiting to be written.

[Miguel Sanchez]

I bought that for PS3 and could never get it to work. Very disappointed.

[Lofarl]

Vampire Survivors.  Looks like total crap.  £3 on steam.  Pure 100% unfiltered crack cocaine.  Play it for 5 mins and you’ll be thinking where the f**k did the day go.

[SweeperDee]

On 01/01/2023 at 15:16, Lofarl said:

Vampire Survivors.  Looks like total crap.  £3 on steam.  Pure 100% unfiltered crack cocaine.  Play it for 5 mins and you’ll be thinking where the f**k did the day go.

I’m going to be serving you legal action due to you introducing me to this game. Absolute crack. Unbelievable.

[Lofarl]

7 minutes ago, SweeperDee said:

I’m going to be serving you legal action due to you introducing me to this game. Absolute crack. Unbelievable.

@DA Baracus Is the guilty party here.  Filthy crack dealer mentioned it on the last page.

[DA Baracus]

On 02/01/2023 at 17:04, Lofarl said:

@DA Baracus Is the guilty party here.  Filthy crack dealer mentioned it on the last page.

Only just finished playing it tonight. Have pretty much done most things I want to in it. Still plenty of shit that can be unlocked (mostly from doing hyper and inverted runs), but can't be arsed with that any longer.

[TxRover]

Went back to an old well. In the early 90’s, Sid Meier’s Civilization was my downfall. At least once I found myself looking bleary eyed at a clock that said 5AM, and realized that I was supposed to get up to go to work in 30 minutes. Stagger to the loo, then a quick phone call (with a terribly acted ill voice) and fell into bed.

Steam has Civilization VI and it’s extras on sale, so what the hell…it can’t do it to me again, can it?

[Miguel Sanchez]

Jak 3 (PS4, 2017 - originally PS2, 2004)

I think I've probably posted about trilogies and the way they're structured before. How they're perceived by the player, how worlds and mechanics evolve over time, how and ultimately how successful this ends up being. Think of a trilogy. How many of them peak with the third instalment?

The first thing I need to point out is that Jak 3 was released a year after Jak II. One year! One year was all it took to ditch the Roman numerals. Enough to add two entirely new open world areas and completely transform the layout of the original.

After saving the world in Jak II, Jak and Daxter... actually didn't save the world at all. Or Haven City. Or the Metal Heads, despite killing their leader. The city got destroyed and they got the blame and got thrown out into the desert to die. Luckily Haven City has a habit of doing this and there are so many Wastelanders out there that there's an entire city for our boys to discover and end up running. Since the existential threat of the Metal Heads isn't really there any more we also end up facing the Dark Makers, big stringy purple guys who come from space and are somehow even greater mortal enemies of the Precursors than the Metal Heads were. 

You know how Jak II was clearly inspired by the open worlds of 3D GTA games? Jak 3 has three distinct areas to explore. Can't imagine San Andreas being released a month earlier was influential in any way. Unlike Jak II though where Haven City felt like something profound, the areas in 3 don't to the same extent. The desert city of Spargus is small and a bit bare. The Wasteland outside is large and there's a lot to uncover when you're driving around, but there's nothing to interact with. There are some abandoned looking buildings and statues, that's it. Haven City is half-destroyed and filled with three separate warring factions, and this is probably the biggest disappointment of the game.

The strangest thing about the locations is that Jak 3 isn't really a typical open world game in terms of moving around and completing missions. It's oddly linear. The story takes you largely from one area to another in a set order, so there's not always a sense of feeling embedded in a location. The pacing of the story suffers as a result, because you always feel as if just completing this next mission in a weird place will take you to one of the sandbox areas and let you establish yourself, but it doesn't. Once you leave Spargus and the desert the game moves around too much, never letting you feel settled in a location. 

Weapons and combat are improved from Jak II. In addition to your gun's four ammo types, each ammo has three different modes you unlock as you progress. They're all wildly overpowered, which is the best kind of weapon. Want a gun where bullets automatically seek out targets? Done. Want one where the bullets ricochet everywhere until they hit an enemy? Done. Grenade launcher? Done. Fallout-esque tactical nuke launcher? You get one of those eventually if you want to completely clear a room, or the entire planet. The sheer volume of variety is brilliant and you'll just enjoy using one until you run out of ammo, then on to the next and repeating this cycle as needed.

Platforming is broadly the same as before and it's fine. In addition to the Dark Eco powers of Jak II, there's now Light Eco which turns you into the powerful being who's going to save the world. Your Dark Eco powers are especially useless given the improved guns, so it's good that they added some more variety to the physical gameplay. You can slow down time to get past certain types of platforming and you can also sprout wings to get you to other ledges that are far away. Most of the opportunities to use these are circumstantial, so it can feel like you get to take turns at the assorted gameplay mechanics whenever the game decides. Similar to the guns though, the variety is so frequent you almost don't notice.

With all of this in mind, the game is surprisingly short. I think my final playtime this go round was under ten hours. Is this a symptom of modern game design, with padding and side missions to create the belief that busywork dragging out the playtime makes a game better? Or more involving, somehow? I'm playing a game where there's objectively lots of stuff, but the final experience ends up feeling brief and somehow less than the sum of its parts. There's no denying it was brief either. There are various Orbs and races dotted around the city areas if you really want to extend your time with the game, but they don't really serve a purpose and the cities are surprisingly awkward to travel around, especially at speed.

The biggest strength of all the Jak and Daxter games as always been the characterisation. This was at its peak in Jak II with lots of varied, well developed and interesting characters. Sadly, Jak 3's characters suffer from the same problems as the rest of the game. Established characters we know and like pop up for a couple of missions and are gone forever afterwards. I think this contributes to the lacking sense of location. Our heroes manage to save things - just - by being as strong as ever, but it's a shame they get so little help along the way. This also makes the story feel less profound and important than before, because it's just sort of... there. You're saving the world from being destroyed and finally finding out the truth about the Precursors, but none of it feels like it matters.

Despite what I've said I do like this game From a narrative perspective it's a fitting end to the Jak and Daxter trilogy. It's fun, controls well and is brimming with content and imagination. Playing it now though, for the first time in years and many further years since I first played it, I just wish it did more with what it has. All the more reason for Naughty Dog to get off their arse and get their focus back in the right place.

[SweeperDee]

On 05/01/2023 at 04:08, TxRover said:

Went back to an old well. In the early 90’s, Sid Meier’s Civilization was my downfall. At least once I found myself looking bleary eyed at a clock that said 5AM, and realized that I was supposed to get up to go to work in 30 minutes. Stagger to the loo, then a quick phone call (with a terribly acted ill voice) and fell into bed.

Steam has Civilization VI and it’s extras on sale, so what the hell…it can’t do it to me again, can it?

Oh, it definitely will.

[BFTD]

On 28/12/2022 at 12:25, Miguel Sanchez said:

I bought that for PS3 and could never get it to work. Very disappointed.

That was it working!

I forgot to mention how shite the camera is - either moving too slow, or whizzing about so aiming is a matter of strafing the rough area that an enemy's in with gunfire. Also, it has an Arkham style combat system, with an attack you're supposed to use to break an enemy's block if they're deflecting your attacks, so you can go back to all of your regular attacks. In reality, you just spam that button and slowly wear down their energy with your one unblockable attack.

There's also these guys in hockey masks who shrug off twelve headshots from the best gun in the game. They just saunter very slowly towards you and, if you can't kill them before they walk around your cover, they kill you quickly. Great when the game throws a few of them at you together.

I don't know if I'm going to make it through the whole thing. It's worse than something like Big Rigs, which was shovelware and never meant to be a proper game. Effort and planning clearly went into this, before the barely-started assets and existing code were just slapped together and thrown out to an unsuspecting public.

[TxRover]

5 hours ago, SweeperDee said:

Oh, it definitely will.

IDK, a few starts and the level of complexity is annoying me a bit versus the original. The game can be stupid in so many ways, it’s too easy to mistakenly move a unit you wanted to do something else with, the opponents get strong soooooo quickly, and, oh , hell back for another round!

Edited January 8, 2023 by TxRover

[Miguel Sanchez]

Journey to the Savage Planet (PS4, 2020)

Journey to the Savage Planet is a first person shooter about... an explorer, employed by Kindred Aerospace to go and explore space and find planets with creatures, resources and so on, and catalogue them. Maybe alert Kindred if there's anything valuable they should come to exploit. Only when the explorer crash lands on ARY-26 it's not actually a planet, and there's a lot more life on it than first thought. Including a giant, foreboding tower that was clearly built by an advanced species. 

The bulk of the gameplay is centred around exploring, cataloguing the world and doing some platforming. You can scan creatures and plants to find out what they're called. You have a pistol which you can shoot any aggressive creatures with. Some will attack you, some won't. As you progress you'll be able to unlock side-quests to upgrade your pistol and equipment, allowing you to jump higher, use your jetpack multiple times to effectively triple jump, that sort of thing. There are lots of creatures and plants which require different approaches to survive, but everything ultimately comes down to firing and moving as much as you can. Nothing's going to kill you unless you get stuck somewhere, or you haven't found many health upgrades. 

The platforming element is a little different, and is arguably the game's main strength. If a double jump is fun, an extremely powerful quadruple jump which effectively lets you fly around for a few seconds is even more fun. There's a grapple system which allows for horizontal and vertical movement, and this just ends up being a satisfying way of spending your time.

While there isn't much interaction with the world outside of the scanning and shooting, the game features an assortment of plants which function as grenades. You find a plant, you pick off a fruit which works as a bomb, or an electric shock, you have to throw it quickly because it's not stable and your suit can't handle it. But then you do a little side-quest and then you can collect and hold them and then the story can move on. There's some nice variety in the combat and exploration available through this but it typifies one of the game's biggest problems. At times it feels very procedural. You need to get somewhere. You find something in the way, so you need to go and find or make something to allow you to move on. Then you go a bit further until the same thing happens with a different plant. In a game which is ostensibly about exploration it feels a bit hollow. 

Despite what I said about the movement, the world itself isn't that interesting to explore. I don't really know that there's a word or phrase for how I felt while I was playing but I suppose I never really felt involved. I didn't care about the planet. Even by the time I got to the end and found out why it was the way it was, I wasn't invested enough for it to have any impact. There's DLC which focuses on a specific area which has been repurposed as a retirement village and this feels more contained and eventful, but the planet as a whole doesn't have a lot going for it. Despite having lots of creatures it feels quite empty, and I think this was my biggest problem. 

Fortunately for players living in a world in the midst of a capitalistic death rattle, Journey to the Savage Planet is a bit subversive. You work for Kindred Aerospace, whose media is very keen to tell you that they're the 4th best interstellar exploration company and that you are worth less than literally everything else on wherever it is you've landed. There are adverts on the screen inside your ship for things like mind wipes that purge all bad thoughts, or the Meat Buddy, where you can pour all your leftover meat into a contraption that turns it into a little pet. You also have a voice in your head from the ship's computer giving you snarky reminders and advice, or the head of Kindred popping up on the screens to give you special messages because you've landed on a planet with something valuable on it. The game is short enough that this content just manages to land on the right side of amusing rather than obnoxious. Ultimately it's just about as frothy as the gameplay, but after finishing the game and seeing (I'm pretty sure) all of this stuff, it's never bad.

If you've read all of this and decided you want to play Journey to the Savage Planet, the good news is there's also a co-op mode available if you have friends. It's short, it's fun, it's made with a reasonable degree of care and creativity. It's not genre defining, but it's a game I don't see anyone actively disliking.

[Mr. Brightside]

God of War Ragnarok - Good but I think I preferred the original, it is also nowhere near Elden Ring, so it's obvious why it didn't win GotY.

[well fan for life]

On 18/01/2023 at 13:56, Mr. Brightside said:

God of War Ragnarok - Good but I think I preferred the original, it is also nowhere near Elden Ring, so it's obvious why it didn't win GotY.

Aye I'd agree. It's a great game and it's incredibly polished but it couldn't quite reach the level of Elden Ring. There's also the fact Elden Ring has more "optional" content than most games have actual content.