Stun locked
Browsing the Xbox Marketplace can often be fruitful in discovering some hidden gem or high profile release. With the easy distribution of digital games, both big and small, many can often go unnoticed. When I came across Immortal Planet, a console port of a 2017 PC release, I was intrigued by its art design and combat; a Dark Souls influenced title framed with an isometric perspective. While there are aspects to Immortal Planet that I truly admire, the game itself is rarely rewarding and borders the line between being both challenging and cheap.
Now, I’ll state for the record that difficulty is beholden to the player and can often create a very different experience for everyone involved. While some may breeze through this title, others may not, and striking the balance between being enjoyable and challenging is sometimes a tough thing to master. While I’ve died hundreds of times during my dozen or so hours with Immortal Planet, many of those deaths felt cheapened by a myriad of gameplay mechanics that don’t feel as polished as they could be, often zapping the fun out of the challenge the game attempts to present.
As you awaken from cryosleep on a long-lost planet, you are soon faced with countless other warriors who have slowly descended into madness. You’ll piece together clues from various NPC’s as they begin to fill out the what’s and why’s as you also try to piece together just exactly who you are and how you fit into your surroundings. The story itself isn’t anything special and is overly thin on its world-building. With no memories to speak of, you’ll die countless times, raising from your cryo-container again and again in order to seek out the truth. Depending on your skill level, you can push through the title in around 5-6 hours, trimming the fat even more as you come to terms with its many mechanics and learning the in’s and out’s of several weapons, items, and enemy attacks.
Games like Sekiro, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, The Surge 2, and countless other games in the genre tend to offer up the tools needed to make you overcome adversity. Enemies generally have tells that indicate when a move is about to come your way, and you’ll adapt to learn the in’s and out’s of combat one death at a time. Immortal Planet, unfortunately, lacks consistent visual information to relay to you, and while much of that is due to its simplistic visuals and pulled back camera, there are other aspects of its design that hold you back from learning from your mistakes.
Pushing through Immortal Planet was far more frustrating than I had expected. While I would eventually figure out certain ways to overcome each boss, there is one single mechanic that ruined any sense of hope that I would eventually learn to have fun with it. As you burn through your stamina, something you’ll always do to dish out as much damage as you can to your foe, you leave your self open to being stun-locked, something you can do to enemies as well since both you and them share in the same set of rules. While performing this act on your foe is vastly satisfying, it doesn’t make the game better when it happens to you, and it will. By being stun-locked, you freeze up, cannot move, and are subject to taking on punishment, with your stun-lock continuing as you are further hit. This means if you are caught in a corner or fail to escape an attack, you can have your health bar decimated in seconds. While I understand the meaning behind why it is what it is, I just don’t enjoy this mechanic and it soured my opinion on the game greatly. The stun-lock lasts far too long and you can often feel hopeless when it happens. While I have other issues with the title, they pale in comparison to just how much this single system has affected my enjoyment of this game.
The overall combat here is all tied to utilizing certain resources, whether that is your abilities to throw ice or fire, stun-lock grenades, or burning through your stamina by attacking or by dashing out of the way of an incoming attack. While your stamina recharges fairly quickly, refilling your items is only possible by visiting a cryo-chamber, a housing cell that you’ll use to upgrade your capabilities and earn back health injectors and more. While you can find health injectors via floor panels here and there, it’s unfortunate that killing enemies or exploring doesn’t let you restock at least some of your other consumables. Considering the number of rooms you’ll need to revisit on your way back to a boss, especially that of your final encounter with Prisoner One, a trek that requires you to push through around 6-7 rooms every time you die, you may need those items to survive that journey. While this causes you to be strategic with your items, it feels limiting that you are not given the tools to survive on your terms.
Your dash, a move tied to your stamina, can often result in dashing off a ledge or missing your jump by a pixel just a bit too often. While thankfully you can’t run off ledges themselves, the dash doesn’t feel as intuitive as it could be given the platform gymnastics you’ll perfect on a constant basis. Another big issue is that your character will often focus on enemies farther away from him than those directly in front of him and it’s left me open for attacks far too often. While you can manually switch to enemies with a quick press of a button, I lost track of how many times my character would swing at the wrong enemy and trap me in a stun-lock, killing me to the most simplistic foes.
As you move around each location, you’ll unlock short cuts within certain rooms. These paths will usually have you bypass enemies, but often those areas you’re bypassing will contain floor panels that contain health injectors. Considering you need them and you’re going to pass through those areas on the way to backtracking to the boss, several of these paths seem rather pointless, given their purpose.
Boss encounters are fairly enjoyable when you can approach them fresh, and several of them are rather enjoyable encounters, except for one. When you discover the hidden temple, an area unlocked when buying a certain item from a vendor, the battle is extremely quiet as you enter the room. You can knock off the sleeping foes around the boss and then do battle. The problem is that death will keep the room in a frenzy when you return, with those enemies up and alert and forcing you to deal with while dodging the boss. Had the room returned to the state I initially found it in, then I probably would have enjoyed it, instead of it being a frustrating mess. While this is the only boss to have this exact issue, every other boss is ready for you to enter the field and can make additional encounters a bit more tense and unpredictable in their early moments.
As you explore, you’ll track down vendors that can sell you items, new weapons, and abilities that let you construct certain builds. As you sink points into certain attributes like Strength, Agility, or Intelligence, you’ll be able to use many of the items you can barter from these NPC’s. Putting points into Intelligence and Willpower will allow you to carry more items, and other attributes like Strength, Agility or Endurance will dictate how much damage you do, how much stamina you have, or how much damage you can take. Each point you purchase increases the price of the next one and so on, and there are countless farming methods available to just over level your character to the point of godhood, or at least to the point where you might survive being stun-locked over and over again. I will also mention that it takes several points into a given category before you really feel or see the effects of your experience meaning something, so it can crucial to stick with just a few core attributes and ignore others entirely.
Weapons have secondary abilities such as slashing out a wave of ice, increasing damage at the cost of health, or lunging forward with the tip of your blade. The weapons are fairly enjoyable to use, but the isometric perspective can often hide your exact range and the clunky nature of movement can limit your precision. It’s not a constant problem as you can perform certain moves to slam enemies off platforms or rely on your items, but gauging range can be difficult here from the angle we get and the hitboxes enemies have.
While I really enjoy the visuals present in the game, I could have done with more visual differences between each zone than just a different color palette. While there are a few greater differences in some areas, the art design present here could have been used to greater effect in creating some truly unique areas. Some of the animations are stiff, but then there are some that are very impressive and neat to witness, such as stabbing the health injector into your neck to heal, something I never got tired of. Though, I will admit that the time it takes to heal is far too long. Visually the game is impressive and while I wish the framerate was a bit more fluid to tackle the split-second timing to dodge certain attacks, the fact this game was made by a team of six people leaves me more impressed than anything else.
With any review I write, I tend to look up information on the game to ensure I’ve covered as much as I can, often digging into the history of development and various other aspects of the game. During my research, I discovered that the creator of the game, patched in a supposed “good” ending that turned out to be a fake update, leading several people to play countless hours of the game trying to unlock something that was never there in the first place. If you’d like more details on this story, check out it out here. While it’s unfortunate that something like this happened, it didn’t affect my time with the game at all.
I wanted to really enjoy Immortal Planet based on the trailer that prompted me to request a review code. While I love the art design and some aspects of combat, the stun-lock system, the dash, and the other frustrations I’ve mentioned really soured my experience to a certain point. I still enjoyed much of my time, but so much here can cause a great deal of frustration, far more than any Souls-like game I’ve played before. If the game felt more rewarding in defeating its bosses or granted you more to approach encounters on your own terms, then I probably would have been able to push past many of its failings. Immortal Planet is by no means a bad game, but it lacks what it needs to be great. If you feel that many of these issues are something you can come to grips with then you may very well have an excellent time with this visually striking Souls-like slasher.
A review code for Immortal Planet was provided for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.