Planet Alpha

Ambiguity is not for everyone, nor is the simple pleasure of walking through a gorgeous sci-fi vista. Replace a few words here and there and that statement that could apply to just about any genre, or style of game. Planet Alpha may not quite have the mechanics to match the sheer variety and wonder of its beauty, but close-enough means that it’s one of the most surprising and wonderful slices of sci-fi we’ve seen this year.

If you like games like Limbo or Inside, don’t miss this one out. Beautiful, fun and very enjoyable.

Gorgeous design quality, accurate controls and interesting use of shifting the time of day make Planet Alpha stand out amongst recent platform based games. It has quick load times, forgiving checkpoints and can actually be quite challenging in a lot of areas. It’s fairly short, but I believe the time spent is very enjoyable.

If you're looking for a (mostly) peaceful gameplay experience that relaxes you and immerses you into an artificial world, Planet Alpha is definitely for you.

A wonderful aesthetics, a comfortable gameplay for everyone, an uncomplicated theme and ingenious puzzles that make use of the graphic engine itself and the stage to solve them.

Absolutely, Planet Alpha puts style over substance, but that doesn’t mean what’s there isn’t worth experiencing. It doesn’t have the best platforming you’ve ever experienced. Nor does it have the best puzzles. But what’s perfectly adequate, when coupled with those visuals, ends up being something quite special.

Planet Alpha is a nice little platformer, well-paced and full of poetry. There are some glitches though, and all these colours are sometimes overloading the screen, thus the action can be chaotic at times.

Planet Alpha puts us in a journey through a gorgeous and artistically superb alien world; it lacks in complexity and challenge, but if you love great aesthetics in games, it's definitely a must buy.

The repetitiveness of the obstacles, the cheap deaths, the annoyance of later platforming sequences set in low gravity, frequent trial and error, and the time it takes to pass through elongated hallways that connect puzzle rooms and platform set pieces all contribute to making the whole thing a bit too tedious and empty for my liking. Now that I think about it, if Planet Alpha were an animated short, I think I’d like it a lot more because the visual storytelling is far more interesting than anything else.

This is by no means a revolutionary platformer. The ability to harness the power of day and night is an interesting concept, and it worked well in setting this game apart from others of the like. The beautifully crafted landscapes are an experience all in their own. If you appreciate games for their visual qualities and aren’t put off by the lack of story, it would be worth crash landing and venturing into this world.

A truly beautiful setting undone by balance issues. Fingers crossed for future fixes. [Nov 2018, p.91]

What is a competent platformer with satisfactory puzzles is marred by these terrible moments of me dying repeatedly to unfair AI. The snarky part of me wants to place a picture over the complimentary parts of this review just like this game puts stuff in the foreground so I can’t see what I’m doing just to prove how annoying that is. This game isn’t bad, it’s annoying. With moments of really solid gameplay peeking through maybe pick this one up on sale but otherwise there are better games doing similar things out there. Pick up Unravel 2 instead.