Planet Alpha

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

.

Review:

Planet Alpha is a puzzle-platformer where you play a man in a space suit who finds himself on a strange and beautiful alien world and must find his way through numerous dangerous environments.

The world “beautiful” definitely deserves emphasis there. The world this game takes place in is absolutely gorgeous, with lush environments filled with all sorts of colorful and unusual fauna and flora, as well as a day-night cycle that shows off the beauty of that environment in different ways. This is pretty clearly the main draw of the game, and the motivation of seeing more of this beautiful planet will often be what propels you forward through the game’s challenges.

The gameplay here is typical puzzle-platformer stuff, with a fair amount of box pushing, some puzzles based on using an ability to manipulate the time of day… oh yeah, and stealth. A lot of stealth.

Ugh… the stealth in this game is really frustrating. As your character has no way to fight off enemies, and many can kill your character in a few successive hits, being discovered by these enemies pretty much always equates to an automatic failure and death. What’s worse, because of the detailed and lush scenery, it’s often unclear what areas are safe and what aren’t, making it frustrating and confusing to try and figure out how to solve some puzzles because there’s just so much detail on the screen that it’s hard to tell what you’re supposed to be looking for.

It’s frustrating to get stuck on these sections, to have difficulty seeing a solution or be blasted by an alien robot because you stuck out in this piece of foliage when you were supposed to be in that one. However, if you have the patience to deal with these sorts of setbacks, Planet Alpha is well worth giving a try if only to explore its amazing world.

tl;dr – Planet Alpha is a Puzzle-Platformer where the main draw is exploring its lush, beautiful world, although doing so will mean putting up with all sorts of frustrations caused by all that detail, especially in the game’s maddening stealth encounters.

Grade: B-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}