Shattered Planet Review

Shattered Planet is a roguelike survival game. Starting off in the tutorial you are told little about what’s going on, you’re simply told to move forward to a teleporter to reach the next world. Once you get there, you will instantly be killed and that’s where the real game begins. By real game, I mean the exact same thing over and over again - get as far as you can, collect intel, kill enemies, find items, die, repeat. Every time you die any items you had equipped or picked up along the way will die as well.

While Shattered Planet is a survival game, the money you collect will allow you to level up each character class as well as buy new gear to help you get that little bit further next time. You don’t level each individual character, but rather the class. The levelling system includes upgrading your health, strength (damage) and wits (dodge). Exploring the randomly generated world is the key to this game, the game rewards exploration with new items, enemies and money. With a beautiful soundtrack in the background, exploration is the most fun you’re going to have in this game.

Running into an enemy is what triggers the combat. Mindless and boring is the best way to describe it, with the choices being try to run away or click a button until either you or the enemy dies. Whilst exploring you will find random items that look like vials: each vial has an unidentified effect whether it be setting you or your opponent on fire, to healing you or your opponent. To determine what an item does you have to either use it on yourself or throwing it at an enemy. This was my favorite part of the game, giving either you or giving an enemy a great advantage or a great disadvantage without knowing before hand. Once an item has been used, if you pick up the same item again it will include the description of what the item actually does.

Various, Hard, Very Hard and Crazy Hard are the difficulty levels of each area. When you are new to games such as these the thought of this would make it easy to put new players off, with the game being pretty difficult straight away. Getting new weapons and armour tends to be a big problem, seeing as the best way to get some as soon as possible is to pay for a random weapon or armour, not knowing what you will be getting. Each time you die you probably would only have accumulated enough money to get some armour and a new weapon, maybe some health packs and a level upgrade too. Though the world is randomly generated, it always feels as if you have done the same area multiple times, just with a slightly different layout.

Originally being an iOS and Android mobile game, it’s not too hard to tell that the options are limited to a couple of sound sliders, resolution and windowed mode. Key rebinding isn’t an option mostly because the game controls only using the mouse to do everything from moving, to selecting and using items. Visually the game isn’t too impressive, looking like a recent Flash title you would see online. Shattered Planet is definitely more suited to playing in short bursts and that’s where it becomes obvious that this game was designed for mobile devices. Being priced at £9.99 on Steam at the time of writing, it’s hard to justify when you can simply download the free-to-play version on your phone or tablet, which in my eyes is the best way to play this game if you are at all interested. The only difference between the PC and Mobile versions are microtransactions, which are characters you have to gain through progress to unlock on the PC version.

Customisation is minimal in Shattered Planet. Once you have selected a class you have the option to change the head of the character with a few choices per class. Armour will also change the look of your character as well as stats. There isn’t much to do outside exploration and just getting further every time, so the amount of time you spend playing depends on how much of this game you can stomach before you get bored. With a standard visual style, nothing much to do outside exploration and boring, repetitive gameplay it is hard to recommend anyone pay £9.99 for this game.