[EGD] Is This Rocket Science?

Journey to Planet Skaro is a game created by empirestatebuild

Here we go, come with me, there’s a world out there that we should see, close your eyes, come with me, with you right here, I’ll…journey to Planet Skaro! What an awkward name for a planet but oh well, not my call. I’ve never heard of this game coming out for EGD before but apparently it was for EGD. Being that it was created and developed by Mr. Empirestatebuild, I didn’t really have much expectations for it, mostly because I’ve played his games before and although they were pretty good, they just never stood out. So hopefully Journey to Planet Skaro proves me wrong and shows to Sploder that Empirestatebuild is force to be reckoned with.

Step 1: Climb into Rocket. Step 2: Fly. It’s not rocket science. Flying like a swallow straight across the sky tearing into space with probes chasing your tails off is though. Journey to Planet Skaro successfully succeeds in creating an action scene with the Hovership, a relatively new utility that was just recently installed into the plat maker. Journey to Planet Skaro is heavily entangled with the use of the Hovership; it’s literally the only way to get from Point A to Point B for like 90% of the game. The action and stealth scenes in Journey to Planet Skaro are also nearly universally revolved around the Hovership and they are perhaps the best scenes you will ever play through in this entire game. It takes a master of game building to create a scene where you’re heart is racing like a sports engine as your rocket is being bombarded by bullets by probes which fly merely inches away from your ship. It takes thinking to get pass this game. If you just blindly charge through it, there’s no way you’ll make it. It forces you to stop and think to yourself “In which way can I lead my gigantic rocket spaceship across the night sky in order to avoid the fury of the fearsome and fierce probes that constantly haunt and taunt me?” If that is what empirestatebuild intended for the player to do then congratulations: you have executed that exceptionally well. Bravo.

Want a heavily story based game? Never mind that, want to take a long walk with a bazillion text messages being constantly beamed in your face? To be honest I skipped most of the text and story in this game just because it became way too tedious to read. In fact, the game was mostly all text and story coupled with a few moments of game-play before constantly switching back to story mode. I loved the tidy bits of stealth and action that the game presented and each time the game decided to flood my screen with text, I just prayed to god that the next bit of action was nearby. It’s not that I don’t like stories or that I’m too lazy to read them, it’s because there was just way too much text. Cut the story some slack and just give me the essentials of it and add some character development. Split the story scenes up and mash them together with some fun intriguing puzzles along with some traps to keep the player on their toes. In fact, if empirestatebuild had replaced a fair bunch of the text scenes with thrilling action ones, the game would be 10x better in my eyes and the story scenes would actually be worthwhile. He had a great idea going with creating all of the superb stealth scenes with the Hovership; why not kick it up a notch? He had something truly revolutionary going but it felt squandered.

Puzzles and traps are like the beef in a burger, and to me, Journey to Planet Skaro was served with no beef, or anything that I would call beef for that matter; only a thin slice of cheese and some lettuce thrown on top. The enemy placement was actually spot on though, especially with the action and stealth scenes with the Hovership. The probes are constantly chasing you and will absolutely wreck your rocketship if you aren’t careful to stealthily go around them. Speaking of going around things, that brings us to another flaw in the game; you can essentially just ‘go’ around everything the game throws at you. If empirestatebuild had built a structure or something that prevented you from so easily avoiding the obstacles then the game would have been a worthwhile challenge. It’s like track where you have to jump over fences, only in this case you can go ‘around’ the fences.

Enemy placement was pretty poor in this game with the exceptions of the probes during the action scenes. In level 10, the level where you have to kill a much of minions, I found myself being kicked around the spaceship and being shot by three minions at the same time while being surrounded by a bazillion of them with only a couple power ups to keep them at bay. I died shortly afterwards, but if the game had placed the minions in better and less frustrating positions, I’m sure that I would still be playing the game. All in all, the game could have improved in this category. As for the rest of the enemies that were not space probes, they were decently placed but it could have been better.

Journey to Planet Skaro offered a potentially revolutionary journey. Empirestatebuild had the whole action thing going with the hovership, but placed these action scenes way too far apart while filling in between them long boring story scenes. He could have added some traps and puzzles to cut up these story scenes but he either didn’t do it or did it but it was so minimal that I barely noticed. All in all, empirestatebuild, if you can improve upon this idea and everything I stated in this review, you would have yourself a revolutionary game that’s potentially revolutionary enough to end up in EGL. Those are my thoughts. So lets get down and dirty with the scoring, shall we?

Game-play: 5/10

Enemy Placement: 3/10

Action: 6/10

Fun Factor: 5/10

Creativity: 8/10

Final Score: 27/50 (F) 54% Awesome

Judgment: If it were up to me, this would not be feature worthy. But who knows, EGD has a knack for featuring sub-par games. Only the future knows.