Lifeless Planet: Premier Edition (Xbox ONE)

Now the clue was really in the title with this one, but apparently I’m on a self destruction mission and need to play all of the most depressing games out there in a row. Lifeless Planet follows the story of the nameless American astronaut as he gets stranded on a... Lifeless Planet. The opening section of the game sees him search for the rest of his crew.

The sound effects and environments are as expected with the game title... lifeless. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing in this instance as it is completely in keeping with the theme of the game. It’s gun-metal grey and rust brown for a reason. Or in this case, faded yellow sand colour and dead plant brown but you get you drift.

The gameplay is where a game like this can really come alive. Unfortunately though it remains very lifeless. You walk around the game environment trying to solve puzzles involving rocks, lasers, the claaaaaaaaw and weird radiating power sources. You have a jetpack to assist you in making some jumps but you will spend most of the game slowly walking across desolate landscape after desolate landscape with no real way of knowing you are heading in the right direction.

I can’t tell you any more about the story without ruining what is a magical experience so I will leave it at that. However I will say this. I found the story aspect of the game to be the most enjoyable and it certainly made walking across the Lifeless Planet worth it.

The one thing that really fucked me off though, and I will cover this more in the achievement section, is the lazy development during the certain parts of the game. At one point I was casually walking through the environment after making a spectacular jump and then just disappeared through the floor my death. Not amused.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Another relatively small achievement hall here but a few are worth mentioning. There are only three unmissable ones from playing the game from start to finish meaning that you have to go out of your way for the completion. Just how far out the way is the question though.

The achievements are structured in such a way that you will need to do two playthroughs to get the most out of the game. The reason for this is that there are achievements for dying in various ways... and another for completing the game without dying at all. You can now see why my earlier falling through the floor fucked me off. What a complete waste of time it would have been to have got that far with a flawless run and have the game screw me in the ass. Thankfully it didn’t happen on my flawless run.

To cover off the death achievements you have to get killed by something mysterious, catch on fire and fall down. There is another achievement for dying in every possible way but the others are secret. There’s not many though so shouldn’t prove too troublesome.

After you have successfully died, there is the small matter of collectibles. You have to gather 15 science samples from the environment. Most of these science samples are actually rocks from planet earth which doesn’t seem to indicate a lot of science in my opinion. There is another for collecting twenty documents along the way and you should get this through natural progression.

Now on to some of the most serious ones, which incidentally includes the first achievement I unlocked. At some point you will come across an abandoned town and to get the first pain in the ass achievement, you have to spend 15 minutes there. Doing fuck all. Just standing around. You can’t even pick your nose as you are in a spacesuit.

This brings me on nicely to the last achievement I unlocked, at the same time as completing the game without dying. You have to complete the game in under four hours. During my first playthough I started wandering if this was even possible but after doing a complete run through of all the platforming sections I was able to nail this at my first attempt.

There is another achievement for playing the game for ten hours but this gets covered from the two playthroughs. I overshot considerably as well because I spent a lot of my first playthough dicking around.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I stated earlier it’s an enjoyable story but the gameplay is so ridiculously repetitive and samey that it made the second playthrough not fun despite the fact it was a speed run. I won’t revisit it and I don’t think it’s one for achievement hunters but it’s definitely worth a run through for the story.