Lifeless Planet

If the game is good or not depends on your perspective and on what you were expecting from it. I was expecting an interactive storytelling game with some few simple puzzles and this is exactly what I got.

Lifeless Planet is a really fun experience, but not a very good game. I’d still recommend it based on the entertainment I got from exploring the mysteries of the game’s world, but I wish I didn’t have to deal with questionable puzzles and mechanics to do so.

If you're in the mood for a soft, sombre trip to another world, consider this for your next. [Sept 2014, p.116]

There's a great idea in here somewhere, but it's hard to find it when it's buried under so much space dust. [Oct 2014, p.80]

Despite having an interesting premise, with a space mission gone wrong on a desolated planet, the experience offered by Lifeless Planet ends up being a bit lacklustre. The graphics is on the weak side and do not do the varied environments justice, while the puzzle- and platforming sections are forgettable at best. A few peak moments could make the game pass among sci-fi enthusiasts, but I would have preferred a more compressed story.

Lifeless Planet is, unfortunately, a little too lifeless. It starts off well, but the story is boring, the locations are bland and the platforming just frustrates.

The game's environments have the appearance of a 3D sandbox but you quickly discover how linear they are. From time to time you'll find a dead-end path with a gameplay-irrelevant collectible doodad perched at the end of it, but the environments offer little of interest outside of the straight-line path to the next platforming segment.

Don't come playing this game expecting plenty of hours played or plenty of mechanics to keep it challenging. It's a chilling "walking simulator". While the graphics are nothing to write home about, they do offer a solid atmosphere.. interactions are minimal but it does a grest job in delivering periodical messages through recording and written logs. Voice acting while quite rare, keeps the pace nicelyyghx

Lo que tenemos aqui es un juego que mezcla varios géneros. Tenemos un juego de exploración y plataformas, con sitio para algún que otro puzzle no demasiado difícil de resolver, aunque no es la jugabilidad su fuerte. Los gráficos tampoco lo son; durante la partida me acordé de mi vieja PS2. Pero no es por esto por lo que jugué este juego. Lo que me atrajo de él fue su premisa no jugable, la historia y he de decir que no decepciona en absoluto. Un cuento de ciencia ficción que podría haber sido contado de mil maneras, una buena historia que es digna de ser escuchada y en este caso jugada. Recomendado pese a sus carencias como juego.

The first thing that catches your eye is the graphics, it's not very good but it doesn't hurt your eyes. The plot is narrated according to the recordings of people or sound recordings, sometimes the hero himself can talk about what is happening. The action begins with the falls of a ship with astronauts with American flags on their shoulders, the main character of the game. He and his team were supposed to colonize an unknown planet, but everything went wrong. There is a huge plus here, not a single place, but 6 places recover from each other not only in the graphics but also in the gameplay. There is no small problem, the game itself does not show all the answers to the questions even at the end of the game. But it does answer the most important things, and that's a good thing, I got drawn into the game and went through it in one day and I don't regret the time spent.

Lifeless Planet has a lot of issues and the few positives it has can’t come close to make it a worthwhile experience. The major issue is that the performance is terrible and the graphics are not very good. Even for a game from 2014 they’re sub par in most areas. The object detail; shadows; lighting; and physics are all sub par to bad. Now given what I just said imagine a game where even on lowest settings I only hit 60 FPS twice; spent most of my time between 30-40 FPS and if I put the settings on highest I drop to 20-30 FPS. Even on highest settings the graphics quality are bad enough that any system that is above onboard graphics should be slicing through this game with ease. There was also a fair bit of pop in regardless of settings. The story started off well enough and had me interested but I wasn’t overly on board with where it went near the end. That’s more a subjective opinion but still. I also think there were several little plot points that needed more work. I liked finding the past reports as a way to shed light on past events. The voice acting was well done. The game play itself was overall pretty decent. Platforming was, for the most part, fun but it could get a little clunky at times. The clunkiness was mostly in the jet pack being pretty finicky in my view. I understand the idea between timing your jumps at the right time but sometimes it just felt all over the place. The puzzles were a mixed bag. Some were very easy, some annoying. They did get a bit repetitive as there are about five kinds of puzzles but two of them made up the majority of puzzles. There were also times where you couldn’t go certain places and the game would kill you for trying. Literally killing you with an invisible wall at times. Fall damage was also all over the place. Sometimes a short fall could kill me; a long fall wouldn’t; and everything in between. I never could get used to the fall damage levels. I played the Premier Edition of Lifeless Planet and I played on Linux. The game only has one graphics option that you can only edit on startup so if you want to try a different setting you have to quit and go back in. This is made even more terrible by the save system. The game has checkpoints and the spacing has no rhythm. Some are spaced out fifteen to twenty minutes apart while others are four or five minutes apart. The main screen also says “save and quit” but that is a lie. It loads the previous checkpoint not where you quit from. As I mentioned performance was terrible yet none of my hardware was taxed very much. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There is an option to brighten dark areas but when I tried it the dark caverns I was in looked the same as before. The game seems to be locked to 60 FPS not that it hits it often. Game Engine: Unity Graphics API: OpenGL Disk Space Used: 922 MB Game Version Played: 2.0.0.0 from GOG Game Settings Used: Fastest; 1920x1080 GPU Usage: 0-20 % VRAM Usage: 238-536 MB CPU Usage: 11-29 % RAM Usage: 2.2-2.7 GB Frame Rate: 32-60 FPS There are a couple good elements to Lifeless Planet but it is a technical mess and the rest is just decent at best. I can’t recommend it even on sale and certainly not at it’s current price of $26.99 CAD. I finished the game in four hours and twenty two minutes. My Score: 4.5/10 My System: Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.3 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.0.11-zen1-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz

This game falls really short on a lot of different levels, and here's why. My friend picked this game up, and asked me if I was interested to play it to have a laugh. I booted up the game, and began playing. At first sight, this game really intrigued me. The reason for that was that I thought this game to be some sort of open world exploration RPG type of deal. Never had I been so sorely dissapointed. The first locale you step into is a desolate, deserted and barren wasteland. You must navigate it and 'manage' your oxygen before it runs out. You are locked into one path you can follow, because of the oxygen limitation, which conveniently dissapears and reappears later in the game. I will not spoil anything, but the next location was also quite interesting, with a bunch of minerals to collect, represented by tiny light-orbs. I thought that it would be wise to collect them, so that I could perhaps craft them into something or use them in some other way. Turns out I can't. These minerals are scatterd around for absolutely zero reason. But I wasn't aware of that yet. I arrive in the third locale. At this point, I've been playing for a good 2 hours, scouring every inch of the absolutely monotonous and linear path. And this is where I start realising what I'm playing, and am left wondering why I'm playing it. But in a few minutes I finally get a tiny cutscene, serving as an introduction to some semblance of a story. So I pursue it, and end up forcing myself into another hour of this nonsense. After that, I tell my friend that I will be sick if I don't stop playing this game and propose to stop this torture. He gladly agrees, and we quit and delete the game entirely. To sum this probably unnecessary story up: don't buy this game. I had high hopes that something exciting was about to happen for the first 2 hours, but nothing did. I hoped that this game would bring something new to the table, but it turned out to be a simple, extremely linear platformer, with dull locations, a shoddy story, zero gameplay, and 2-3 pseudo-puzzles, which wouldn't even be a challenge for a 3-year-old. All you do is jump from one rock to another, and literally nothing else. I don't know if the game has anything to offer beyond the point where I stopped playing, but that would still not make it deserving of your money. **** makes you suffer through the first 3 hours (at least), it's not a good game. All in all, the dev gets points for effort, since he's a one man team as far as I know, but the game itself is poor to say the least.