L.G.C. |Reviews| — Planet Explorers

This week your intrepid heroes crash on a planet, dig some holes, and chop down a tree. Planet Explorers faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Planet Explorers
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/237870/
Devel: Pathea Games
Engine: Unity
Price: €22.99 / US$24.99 / CDN$27.99

Wazzat: Planet Explorers is an open world sandbox adventure RPG game set on a distant planet. The game uses a new OpenCL calculated voxel system to allow players to change the terrain in any way, create new objects such as weapons, vehicles, objects, and do it anywhere.

Mandatory disclosure: They discovered some keys for us

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

V-

Your fancied up Unity scream of nope is hella annoying.
Seriously, it full screens for fk and all reason.

J-

Don’t try to resize that startup screen
Multiplayer averaged about 35FPS on UHD
Had to change my monitor’s resolution to 1080, at which point I was averaging 97 FPS
Nope, you can switch the resolution in the stupid launch dialogue. Why does that exist again?

P-

I hadn’t seen a Unity game attempt to fullscreen into both my monitors and fail so disastrously since Unity 4.
But they’ve managed to kick it up a notch and the game proper outright ignores the resolution I set and always attempts to use both monitors if I set it to fullscreen.
Just because you made the Unity screen of nope look good doesn’t mean I don’t know it when I see it.
Every now and again the game just crashes.
- Sometimes while it’s loading, other times smack in the middle of something I was doing.
Also, the performance in multiplayer sucks big tits!

Total-

Shiny / Sounds

V-

It looks alright for an Early Access game.
Never noticed the sounds.

J-

The stock unity assets really do take away from the majesty of the world
Oh yes, it has a soundtrack
It also have a pair of croony folks singing a cheesy ass song with the name of the game in it
- That got it noped quick

P-

It’s good to see a survival game with crafting elements which doesn’t rely on some bullshit form of hipster pixel visuals.
There was a surprising amount of effort put into the background music of this game but it got muted pretty damn fast.
Also, I’m going to give it bonus points for not falling into the pretentiousness many other games do and calling it “Depth of Field” when it is, as this game calls it, Depth Blur.

Total-

Control

V-

Menu navigation is a PITA.

J-

This game doesn’t like handling multiple inputs

P-

I’d like an option to set the mouse sensitivity individually from when I’m just looking around to when I’m trying to aim a gun.
Or at least 2 different sliders, one for first person and another for 3rd person.
I’d also like an option to have dedicated button to do the little dodge roll.
Double tap is all well and good, but when the combat gets proper flustercucky more often than not my character won’t do the dodge roll and he’ll end up on his ass.

Total-

FUN

V-

The pathfinding is hilariously bad / on rails.
- I’ve had the engine (┛ಸ_ಸ)┛彡┻━┻ and respawn a NPC because stuck.
I gave 0 fks about Minecraft but this manages a solid 0.5.

J-

The only fun I really have with these sorts of games is playing with friends. And that’s just because I’m hanging out with friends
I tried the story mode for about an hour.
It’s just a weird looking 3D starbound
The story mode is a series of endless fetch quests, that I’m not really all that interested in completing
Pedro will go on about the depth of the crafting, but I couldn’t get too far into the tree. Buying blueprints is bullshit!
This game might appeal to some people, but I am not one of them.

P-

There’s one thing I like to do when throwing chairs at a game and that is comparing it to other videogames.
In my opinion doing so kills the two proverbial birds with one stone. More specifically, people who have also played those other games get a good base of comparison and they also get to formulate their own opinions from my biases.
With that little prelude out of the way:
- As Jordan mentioned on Thursday during the live-stream, the crafting is more Terraria than it is Minecraft.
- The combat is very similar to Dragon’s Dogma, which in turn was just a streamlined version of the combat in Monster Hunter.
- The “Exploration” is probably where the game falls the shortest, although even then it still has more depth than No Man’s Sky ever did.
But when you put all these elements together, and put your paintball helmets on kids because I’m going to start using broad strokes, it reminds me a lot of Legends of Aethereus.
- I’m willing to say if the developers of that piece of shit had doubled down and actually finished the game, the end result would have been very similar both aesthetically and on the surface level mechanics to what we have in Planet Explorers.
But they didn’t and so Planet Explorers is not only the superior game, it is also cheaper and still being actively maintained.
Oh and shitty performance notwithstanding, the multiplayer actually works!
It’s also nothing short of amazing how you can literally create entirely custom weapons, armor and vehicles directly in game.
There’s enough game here for you to lose the rest of your life in, assuming you’ve managed to stop playing Minecraft long enough to watch this review.
But something tells me, much like Minecraft, the moment I’m done with the Story mode I’m never touching it again. I’m already starting to have trouble justifying restarting the game when it crashes.