The Long Journey Home Review

It’s a tale as old as time -- a science experiment goes wrong, blasting space travelers across the universe to greet strange alien life and just try to survive. Okay, so it’s a tale as old as Star Trek: Voyager and Farscape, but still.

Developed by Daedalic Entertainment (yes, the point & click adventure guys) The Long Journey Home sees you, as I mentioned, flung to the opposite corner of the universe. It’s a randomly generated roguelike universe where you interact with strange aliens -- and some very friendly ones. You have practically nothing when you arrive, so you have to make use of trade, barter and your planetary lander. Your main priority is getting your crew of four back to Earth.

In your lander, you head down to the surface of planets you encounter to get raw materials. Drill for ores, suck up gas from volcanos and find points of interest. By sending your crew member out (they just describe what’s going on) you might find useful stuff such as fuel pods, or perhaps a deadly pathogen which inevitably kills the crew member. If you’re not careful, that fuel pod will be the thing that carried the deadly pathogen…

The ships look awesome

Each planet has a variety of elements which you need to consider before you do a bit of Lunar Lander -- because that’s exactly how the planet-based portions play out. Gravity, convection, surface temperature -- they all have to be considered, since you might burn up all of the potential fuel you’ve gathered simply reaching orbit. There is a readout which says how dangerous the planet will likely be, from harmless to deadly. Unless it breaks, of course.

That’s where the roguelike element comes into things. Depending on which of the three difficulty modes you choose, the severity of everything will change. On Story Mode your casual bump into a rock could be ignored. On Adventure Mode it might give the pilot whiplash and damage your thrusters enough to make them cut out intermittently.

Things are a little less random with the aliens you meet: each race has their likes and dislikes. For instance, one particular race hates it when you tell them to shove their religious literature. Another will declare war on you just for showing them a weird artifact. Some are vehement traders, others see themselves as above you and more are insane warriors who need blasting out of the stars.

That temperature warning obviously wasn't kidding

That is to say, your vessel is equipped with broadside-firing laser cannons and shields. Combat, conducted in the same 2D top-down perspective as all space stuff, can become quite intense, especially when there are a few ships all flying around taking shots at you. You can come across certain beings willing to sell you shields or weapons, but those are quite rare in my experience.

Graphically, The Long Journey Home looks really good. They’ve gone for a stylised look to everything, with a slightly big-head design to the humans, and it really suits the look of the galaxy. The alien designs are all very different, from plant-based to the aforementioned warlike beings. You have a choice of three ships, and three landers, and each one looks distinct.

The galaxy itself is very colourful, but honestly most of the systems look alike. There are different types of stars, black holes and pulsars, but there are always a couple of planets and possibly an asteroid belt. One or two systems in each galactic cluster will have a starport/jump gate to reach the neighbouring galaxy, but apart from that the only variation will be in what can be mined from each planet. There are some nice touches though, like the grid placed over the backdrop of stars will bend towards the background where the stellar body’s gravity will start to affect you.

Unfortunately, this is the best I could do to represent Saints Row.

One thing I loved pre-release, was that the font for each alien was different. I’m a little dismayed that it’s all one uniform font now -- sure, it’s all supposed to be translated to English through the computer, but it was cool to see the different accents. Especially since there’s little audible difference between each race.

Speaking of accents, I don’t know if it’s a bug or supposed to show that the crew are multilingual, but I’ve had several occasions where the little asides they utter as you cruise through space were in English. While it did stop them being quite as repetitive, I’m not certain that it was intentional. Six hours of play will make you notice them, nine they start getting annoying...

Ignore the almost destroyed hull...

My main issue with The Long Journey Home is the fact that it’s a roguelike. I hate losing my progress in games, so a game that you can lose is not going to be my favourite thing. I do, however, really enjoy each playthrough -- if only because each time I play I know more than I did last time. Not all aliens are telling you the truth, and not everything is as it seems on first glance.

It’s slow moving, but that’s mainly because you’re trying to conserve fuel. If you’re awful at resource management, then you’ll find The Long Journey Home takes longer than it should. There’s quite a bit to do and see, and kill, but if you want a time sink then this will be right up your alley.