Journey to the Savage Planet review for Nintendo Switch

Even though I wasn?t a huge fan of Journey to the Savage Planet back when it first came out on PS4/Xbox One/PC, I was still curious to check the game out again now that it?s out on the Switch. After all, I didn?t dislike the game, so much as I was disappointed that it wasn?t anywhere near as good as it could have been.

It?s a good thing I decided to give the game another shot, because I like this version a lot more than I did when I played it on PS4. It?s still got some flaws, but, all in all, I feel like the things that I disliked about the game are a lot less obvious now than they were earlier in the year.

For starters, it?s not broken anymore. My biggest complaint about Journey to the Savage Planet on PS4 was that there were moments where it was fundamentally unplayable. Enemies you had to kill in order for the storyline to advance simply vanished. You could walk through walls — but only sometimes, because other times you?d just get stuck inside them. You?d get a warning that a predator was nearby, even when there was nothing to be found, and you couldn?t do anything to shake it. Any positives there were to be found were, as far as I was concerned, far outweighed by the fact the game just didn?t work.

On the Switch, thankfully, the game feels a little more finished. I noticed some kind of glitchy moments — for example, when I was far enough away from some predators, I would see them skip from one animation to the next — but none of them were of the game-breaking variety. Even more importantly, they were fewer and further between. For the most part, the game manages to run pretty smoothly, which is an accomplishment when you consider how big this world seems.

Admittedly, I get the sense the game had to sacrifice quite a bit to make that happen. While the game still looks as bright and vibrant as ever, when you get up close to objects, they don?t look quite as gorgeous as they did on PS4. They look a lot muddier, for lack of a better description — still eye-searingly bright, but blurrier.

Nonetheless, because the game generally worked a lot better this time around, I found it much easier to get into the gameplay loop of carry out task-go back to the ship-go back to where you just work and get a little further. It was occasionally annoying — especially when I?d die mid-loop, and had to work my way back to where I was — but that?s by design. I?d much rather that a game intentionally make me have to make up progress, than to have to make up progress because I had to quit and restart at the last save point due to the game being broken.

Basically, I?m just happy that Journey to the Savage Planet on the Switch finally has it living up to the potential the game showed back when it was first teased. It?s kind of ironic it had to be visually downgraded to achieve that, but if I have to sacrifice a bit of performance to get a lot more fun out of a game, that?s a trade-off I?ll take every time.

505 Games provided us with a Journey to the Savage Planet Switch code for review purposes.