Journey to the Savage Planet from 505 Games and Typhoon Studios is back, this time with an all-in-one edition that is upgraded and optimized for home consoles! Clocking in at 60FPS on 4K screens for the Xbox Series X and slightly less on the Series S, this is a journey worth taking! So without further ado, welcome to ARY-26! It’s a barren planet, a lifeless planet. Wait, no it’s not. It’s covered with weird animals, plants, plantimals, and a whole bunch of alien tech! That’s not how things are supposed to be when you’re exploring for the 4th best exploration company in the galaxy!
Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition from 505 Games and Typhoon Studios is a fascinating, vibrant first person exploration game where you play a nameless explorer sent to an obscure planet in the hopes of finding a new home for humanity. However, your crappy corporation had no idea that this planet was teeming with life and tech and that the future of humanity might be right at your fingertips…if you can survive. This new edition has a lot going for it in addition to the visual updates. The Hot Garbage DLC has been added in, there are new ads (and hilarious ones), new videos from the CEO of Kindred Aerospace, and even some new filters and borders for photo mode!
You see, ARY-26 is absolutely teeming with weird aliens, plants, and strange stuff. And most of it can kill you, or at least give you body-strengthening tumors (yay, tumors!). The great thing about Journey to the Savage Planet is that it’s not only fun and creative, but it’s hilarious too! This is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but also doesn’t forget skimp on the mechanics of that game. Everything about your company is half-assed, but it’s that way on purpose to provide more than its fair share of comic relief. From the Alien goo that you eat to the disturbing error rate in reprinted bodies if you die, everything has a subtle or not-so-subtle comic bent to it. That’s not to say there isn’t a serious game underneath, but it’s sheathed in a slick, fun wrapper that’s almost impossible not to love.
In Journey to the Savage Planet, you’ll find yourself in the midst of a massive first person open world, one that’s more than a bit reminiscent of Metroid Prime mixed with a fair hint No Man’s Sky (minus the space travel). There’s no procedural generation here though, and where Metroid is a much more intense experience, Journey to the Savage Planet takes a noticeably lighter and more colorful approach. This is a vibrant 1960s psychedelic version of what a Metroid Prime game could be. Don’t be mistaken however, as things are much tougher that they might appear. Whole sections of the game are simply floating in the air, leaving you to hurtle yourself over bottomless chasms haplessly, hoping for the best while your stomach is in knots. It’s honestly stressful to find some of the hidden areas in Journey to the Savage Planet and completionists will have to be incredibly daring and creative to find everything there is to find in this wild wonderland of weird. Let’s just say that if you can’t handle games where there’s no ground beneath your feet, this will be a tough go.
Mechanically, Journey to the Savage Planet is fairly straightforward. Shoot things, collect items, jump around, try not to die. The game warns you that you can only die 50 times before you’re unable to be resurrected, so maybe avoid that. There are noticeable Metroid Prime nods all over, especially with the shrines that you collect upgrades from which very much resemble Chozo technology and some of the enemies and fight styles, but this is a less technical exploration game than that. You’ll get a variety of comically squishy alien items that you can adapt for use to progress, and you can use them in some bizarre ways. Oh, and their poop too. As you play through, you’ll unlock alien teleporters too, allowing you to jump back and forth to your ship to deposit items and obtain messages. Ultimately, there’s a lot of running about and blasting things and every bit of it is incredibly fun!
Gameplay is mission based, much like most open world games, and you have primary, secondary, and science missions, as well as some world exploration goals. There’s no set way to complete things but the natural progression of the game will be driven by the upgrades you manage to obtain which organically allow you to reach new areas bit by bit and revisit old ones to find new areas. Hunting down hidden items like alien alloys and fuel canisters will allow you to craft new and improved weapons and gear with the fairly simplistic crafting system and in theory, eventually get you back to Earth safely. Yeah, that’ll happen.
There are a variety of enemy types and weird, challenging bosses in the game, and chances are some of them will utterly decimate you. If you manage to get back to your corpse, you can raid it for a few extra resources, a bizarre little nugget tossed in just for fun (and to make sure you don’t go resource poor). Bosses and enemies both require a wide variety of strategies and exploits to their weaknesses, some taking pinpoint accuracy to defeat, challenging with your limited weaponry. Fortunately there are health plants and other helpful things all over the place or you’d be dead pretty darn fast most of the time.
Unlike the Switch version of the game from a few years ago, the updated XSX Employee of the Month Edition is one of the most polished games around. Sure, Journey to the Savage Planet looked good before, but this? *chef’s kiss* Not only does the XSX amp up the frame rate and draw distance, but enemies move smoothly and naturally no matter how far away they are. There’s also no load time in the game. The older versions of the game left you waiting in transition, especially in the Switch version, but now your gameplay flow is almost entirely unimpeded, streamlining gameplay and immensely heightening the sense of immersion the game provides. The bigger your TV, the better things look too and this is really the experience that Journey to the Savage Planet was meant to be.
There’s a lot going on visually in the game as well. It’s hard to explain just how incredibly visually stimulating Journey to the Savage Planet really is until you start playing but the graphics are just so bright and alien and in your face that it’s hard to really process the game at first until your mind wraps around what an incredible job the team over at Typhoon Studios did. With the updated visuals things are even more intense too, so be prepared to be a bit overwhelmed, especially at first. The music is incredibly upbeat and intense as well too and the compositions have a unique, toe-tapping vibe to them that will have you humming well after you’re done playing. It’s not often that a new IP manages to really nail all the components in the way that Journey to the Savage Planet does, but when it happens, it’s certainly a welcome surprise.
There’s really only one major complaint to be had with the game and that’s the control scheme. The sheer amount of stuff you have to do and unique gadgets you end up with mean a particularly complex control scheme. That hasn’t changed at all from the original version of the game and it’s not that the controls are bad exactly; they’re just not entirely intuitive at first. There’s a learning curve to Journey to the Savage Planet in terms of control and it takes a while for each new component to feel natural. Sure, you’ll get the hang of it after a bit, but it would have been nice for the mapping to be just a hair more newbie-friendly. It also would have been nice to be able to put the item in your off hand away and just carry your gun around because that extra hand there really interferes with the gorgeous vistas that comprise the bulk of the game!
Tiny, niggly, unimportant issues aside, this is a well-crafted sci-fi experience that takes itself just seriously enough to be compelling and is more than a little deceptive. Everything looks happy and fun and silly, but the gameplay is complex and will present challenges for even veteran gamers. Throw in some wild science experiments, such as hurtling yourself off a massive cliff and using thrusters to save yourself at the last second, as well as some truly bizarre advertising playing on your ships vidscreens and you’ve got yourself a game that really manages to stand on its own and find a unique identity.
In addition to all of the craziness thrown at you in Journey to the Savage Planet, there are even alternate modes. Instead of a New Game Plus, the devs have tossed in what they call “Old Game Minus”, a version of the game that gives you three lives and a timer with no continues for the truly hardcore. Once you get to the Hot Garbage DLC, it automatically becomes accessible as well, a convenient integration. Things seem a bit overwhelming at first because the sheer amounts of things to explore are staggering, but the game itself isn’t all that long. A dedicated player could likely blow through the whole thing in about 12-15 hours, and if you’re wandering about gawking at the sights and trying to find everything, maybe 20 or 25 hours. That’s not too shabby, all things considered, especially when you’re looking at only $30 (you’re basically getting the DLC and upgrades free!) for an absolutely AAA gaming experience that will scratch that 3D Metroid itch once you’ve blown through the Metroid Prime remaster that just dropped!
In fact, if you bought a previous version of the game on Xbox, you get an upgrade for free too! A hearty thank you is owed to Typhoon and 505 Games for bringing us Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition, dropping it on Game Pass, and making it cheap and accessible to a whole new group of future fans! This is truly what the FPS exploration genre should look like and a game that pretty much every gamer should play! It’s hard to believe this isn’t a brand new game that was just developed for modern consoles and it’s unfortunate that more games aren’t this much fun! But hey, we’ve got Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition to play and that’s more than good enough for basically everyone!
This review was based on a digital copy of Journey to the Savage Planet: Employee of the Month Edition provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X system and is also available on the Playstation 5. Just try to stay out of the alien hallucinogens. Or don’t. We won’t judge. Well, at least not to your face.