Robinson: The Journey Review

Robinson the Journey is one of the most anticipated titles for Playstation VR, but does it live up to the hype? Starting with what everyone will notice right away, I must say the graphics are gorgeous. The stunning wide open areas and beautiful green jungles are literally crawling with life. It feels like you are there with all the wild animals. The environments and  creatures are nicely detailed, making the experience even more realistic. My only problem with the graphics is the occasional pop-in of some of the character/environment models. This may potentially be only an issue on older models of the PS4 and not the PS4 Pro. Other than the pop-in affects, the graphics like I said are great. The PlayStation VR really makes you feel immersed in the world around you because of the depth it helps provide.

The sound design further enhances the experience. This game takes full advantage of the 3D audio. You can hear the occasional roar of a T-rex off in the distance and even the sound of bugs or snakes rustling in the grass. The atmosphere of this game pulls you in even more because of how well the sound design is.

The gameplay is where this game begins to fall short. Using the dualshock 4 you can around the environments, the problem with this is it never feels natural. The in-game hud shows the player holding something that is similar to the move controller but the only control option available is the duelshock 4 because of this, you have no control where your hands are. This is something that could have been fixed if you could use the move controller. Not having full control of course dampens the experience a little. Another issue is the AI acts up sometimes and there is occasional bugs that pop up. One such bug was early in the game in the jungle area. I had to solve a puzzle by pouring water on some fungus so the plant will let me climb to a new area. The problem is once I pulled on some debris that would cause this the event didn’t trigger. I had to reload my save and then it worked. The puzzles when they are not bugging out consist of routing power between generators, helping a baby dinosaur escape a tar pit, and retrieving a stolen higs unit from dinosaur ect. The AI issues I had were mostly with Laika the pet T-rex in the game. Laika would sometimes jump to her death on her own, without any commands given to her. Thankfully she would quickly respawn nearby so it wasn’t that big an issue. It was slightly comical to see but a bug like that is kind of embarrassing, hopefully it gets patched soon. After playing the game my other major problem would be the walking speed. This maybe a design choice so players don’t get motion sickness easily however I would argue that they could have had a feature in the game settings to adjust this. The game RIGS allows you to adjust the speed so the developers of this game could have added this sorely missed feature. The movement speed becomes apparent to the player after you have already gone through a section of the map and you want to quickly get through it.

The story is ok. The general idea is a space colony takes severe damage so they send out the emergency space pods. After your pod crash lands on a nearby planet you must look for clues as to what caused the crash and if there are any other potential survivors. To get a better idea as to what the plot is you must scan broken higs units you will come across and then listen the audio logs.

As for the replay value I would say there is very little reason to come back to this title after you beat it. The only reason would be if you missed a chance to scan an animal and are after the trophies . What could have helped this more is if there were less scripted events that took place and replaced that with more random events, this would help change the experience making it different each time you play.

I would either wait for this to hit the bargain bin or rent it if you can. This game is not worth full price at all, and that is unfortunate especially because I had such high hopes for this game. While the graphics and sound design are amazing, the gameplay hinders the experience. Top that off with a game that is only about 4 hours long and with hardly any replay value, and you really start to see the flaws. Hopefully they patch most of the issues, but until then  I will give Robinson the Journey a 5/10.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.