Developer Data Realms
Publisher: Data Realms, LLC
Platform: PC,
Tested on: PC
Planetoid Pioneers – Review
Coming upon something that was never found before is a humongous adventure that is fun, exciting and scary. In Planetoid Pioneers you are space Columbus ready to discover some new planets and inhabitants. You will need to fight your way through a range of enemies, manage survival and crafting and when all is well, you can finally go back to discovering the galaxy.
Story
One day Crazy Bob is cruising the open space in his luxurious space yacht. This happy life didn’t last long as suddenly something breaks and he crashes on the planet named Primoid. This huge and hostile place houses the remains of an advanced civilization and the only means to get out of there again is by building a new vessel with the parts of a broken down space ship. Once you collect the blueprints for the ship a new adventure starts to gather all the materials needed. As you move deeper into the caves you unmask the many secrets this place has and it keeps you going to discover more and more of the story, giving this game a perfect flow.
Graphics
The galaxy is a beautiful place to explore and the planetoid we crash on is something amazing as well. With a handful of different fauna and flora that each dictate their own zones this is all perfectly handcrafted. While on the surface everything looks natural and enjoyable you will see that the deeper you dwell the more sophisticated things become and the more manmade everything is. The overall graphics are superb and the pixel-art that is used with creating and destroying of objects step by step flows well with the smooth hand-drawn background.
When you are performing actions from building constructions to murdering many of the planets inhabitants or even vandalizing stuff, everything is animated to the finest of details. You see every piece of damage and destruction present from status altering effects like burn or freeze to parts being chipped off by bullets and metal being consumed by acid.
Sound
It is hard to describe the masterpiece that is the sound of Planetoid Pioneers. The game creates such a wealthy atmosphere with its rich soundtrack and gets us in the mood to play every time over and over again. Each area has its own kind of mood and the melody that is played perfectly resembles what you are feeling. The other thing that scores greatly is the effort put into the sound effects. While the game is overfilled with so many objects, a lot of them have unique sounds, weapons sound so empowering that when you let the machine gun rip you feel like the Terminator walking through the deep corridors of the planetoid.
Your protagonist is also voiced in the game, with him talking you through the story and him interacting with various situations. What makes this even cooler is that when you switch bodies with another pioneer (this will be explained in the gameplay section) your voice also changes in normal situations (but is not in certain events).
Gameplay
Planetoid Pioneers is a side scrolling adventure game where you must build, destroy and collect in order to make progress. It all begins with you crashing into something called a Planetoid, with your ship broken and no other option to escape you must explore the distant lands and collect blueprints to ultimately be able to build an escape vessel. Acquiring blueprints is done by either absorbing items or being awarded with them in treasure chests. Breaking down objects to their core components is used for later crafting, this means that you will gather basic elements such as water, carbon and metal. These will be used in the creation of new parts such as weapons, constructions, junk and being able to respawn where you want.
So now on the subject of dying, in most games death either means the end and going back to the last checkpoint. In this game however death never means failure. If there is the unlucky event of you dying or your body becomes so destroyed that you have no other choice but to pass through you will have two options. The first is to place a pioneer pod to enable body switching to that place (like a selected check-point) or you can teleport to a save spot in order to get resurrected there. While the body might be broken the soul of Bob lives on and will be taking new forms for us to continue.
What makes this game such fun is that you can just destroy everything in your path, absorb the elements and create new things from this. You will never have to worry about weapons since if it’s spent you can just have a new one right away. Planetoid Pioneers is geared towards having fun and feeling in power like a god with creation at just the push of a button, there is a little quirk in the system that we will talk about later on. The game controls really well and the character reacts firmly to commands. It is very fast to pick up and play with a very low learning curve and some margin for error. This makes exploring the game very fun thanks to the open world and many possibilities you can do alone or with a friend as a couch co-op title.
Where the game does have it downside is the realism that sometimes is just too stressful. People who played Scribblenauts might recognize the controls and others who don’t will notice that the game tries its best to be ultra realistic with each footstep or body part working correctly. The physics engine is very good but this can lead to frustrating moments that the character will slide, fall down or bluntly panic and loses it for a second (this is due the full 360 view and placement of the body). Also the game does take quite some time to load up, but we can understand this because of the large amount of data that is needed to be loaded and furthermore no in-game loading times (just like in GTA).
Conclusion
Planetoid Pioneers is a great open world game in which you can explore, craft, create, destroy and just have hours of fun in alone or with a friend. The easy ‘consume and utilize’ gameplay allows you to easily fill up your resources and spawn whatever you like in order to continue your quest to getting off the planet.
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