Review: The Long Journey Home

 Navigating the universe in an isolated or lost ship with the uncertainty that the crews are waiting for in every system, alien contacts with a variety of intentions, a search for resources that allow you to continue the journey, a permanent tension coated with the discovery of an unknown, non-linear, procedurally generated universe ... Has players who consider this to be pure poetry, gaming equivalent to feast for the mind, eye, ears and soul.

All the ratings are subjective, but at the end of this text, you estimate the rating of freakin' subjective: I am a sacker for old Amiga / MS-DOS hits such as Starflight, Exodus 3010 and Star Control 2, and I can not be objective at all after Z Years I get something similar. The hunger for such games has been enhanced by a decades-old emptiness. If it were not an FTL and a pleasant mobile surprise known as Out There, the cosmos would be solely for static 4X strategies and some of them misguided or remastered ( Homeworld ) RTS.



The Long Journey Home is a story of an unfortunate case that has grown into an adventure of life (or death) of the four-seater crew of the first experimental hyperspace ship that a man ever made. Instead of a pitiful jump in the Alfa Centauri system, the hyperspace module threw 37,500 pieces of Earth from Earth, that is, about 123,000 light-years away from home. If we recall what kind of problems a USS Voyager crew, leaked only 75,000 light-years into the Delta Quadrant, had a ship capable of warp 9,975, warped crew, superior federations shields, and tricobalt torpedoes, we can assume what awaits four unprepared and crazed scientists at the other end of the wild galaxy, in a board whose defensive and attacking characteristics are a bit stronger than salty plasma.

They are primarily waiting for them for metals, minerals, and gas, which allow them to fill the tanks and patch holes on the ship's plaque. The first concern in the game will be to teach you intersystem flying, using thrust and gravity of planets and stars to turn around with fuel savings. The toughest thing at the beginning is to "capture" the orbit of the planet you want to land on, which is recommended to practice until discomfort in the tutorial mission, before jumping into the unknown. By the way, for normal gaming, you will need a gamepad (Xbox 360 / Xbox One or some third, XInput compatible), while using the keyboard and mouse is real torture due to the ignored analog game controls.

In the game, everything is not reduced to the game of numbers and survival, but there is also a solid dose of roleplaying, characters, and lores that spice up the atmosphere of gloomy survivalism. You are starting the crew from the pool of twelve potential candidates, taking care that the selected person contributes to your future success and what kind of useful item is in the inventory. Though it sounds logical for you to test a pilot with a glazing tool or first-aid kit scientists worth more than a young blogger with a laptop, a medium and advanced stage of the game in which you will fight for the affection of one or more alien empires can easily convince you otherwise. A skillful, cute bang with a talent for retraction can be more useful to you than a pilot who is fat up to the elbow ... Your crew's personality comes to light even when giving while you fly or farm resources: you will often engage in spontaneous dialogues, comment on the situation, the chances of survival, or some recent event, or will argue about who should actually command the ship.

Conclusion

The Long Journey Home to many will be super-frequent due to the fogged orbital-gravitational cinematics and the very fluttering behavior of landers when landing on the planets, and because of the constant need for manual mining, any less patient player will play and the game will be uninstalled on the first day. In order to enjoy the game, you need to belong to the noble skirts from the beginning of the text, capable of swimming with gravity wells and sunbathing on the radioactive rays of red giants.

My personal rate: 8 / 10