The Long Journey Home Reviews

The characters and their interactions are relatable, amusing, and compelling, and the spirit evoked of exploration and discovery in a universe of endless forms most beautiful is wonderful. The problem is all of the actual gameplay. The space navigation system is physically inaccurate: at the speeds being traveled, gravitational effects would be almost negligible, as you can see by moving along a planet's orbit in-game orders of magnitude faster than the planet. This matters because it forces you to try to make good use of orbital mechanics to conserve fuel, which is impossible to do effectively because not enough information is provided about your projected trajectory. This would be mostly fixed by having the larger-scale minimap show your projected path, but it doesn't. And because there's not enough info provided for quantitative analysis, this makes it impossible to execute things like Hohmann transfer correctly and forces you to waste fuel on violent course corrections when approaching objectives. (As a purely visual note, while you are turning, a control thruster is shown continuously firing while the turn is going on; thrusters should fire only to start and end the rotation.) It is impossible to get useful information about the alien races without a lot of wading through the online wiki because every alien ship/station has an arbitrary limit to the number of topics you can ask about, even in contexts where this clearly does not make sense (Glukkt trying to gain new customers). Likewise, the system for selling goods requires you to make wild guesses about what to sell things for, and end up either receiving far too little for one's goods, or being locked out of trade with a particular station entirely, because there is also an arbitrary limit to how many offers you can have be refused. The alternative is looking everything up in the tables on the wiki to determine exactly what Species X will pay for Item Y, which takes all the fun (if you can call it that) out of the negotiation system. Items for treating medical conditions are one-use-only, are used on a single character, and correct all of the character's applicable medical conditions. This is profoundly annoying because you don't want to waste the items on a character with one condition who might get more of the same types later, but the character then is constantly complaining about the condition, so it doesn't work as an abstraction. Likewise, repairs to categories of spacecraft and lander systems cost the same regardless of the number of defects, encouraging this ridiculous game of chicken against the defects. There are too many random malfunctions and they are too expensive to fix. The planetary hazards are too dangerous and random, and because of this, force players to waste a lot of time repeatedly restarting planetary operations. Ruins and organisms on planets are in illogical places, and backgrounds are not properly tied to the planetary conditions described. The threshold of contact speed for damage to lander and injuries to pilot is too low; the LEM of the 1960s had more effective shock absorbers. In space combat, for some reason, if you collide with the enemy ship (of any type), you take damage but they don't. Also, in some cases, a very bright sun is right in the middle of the background for space combat right where your ship is, making it impossible to see inbounds and how you are maneuvering. There's no real subsystem damage except for you: everything runs on health bars and Critical Existence Failure. I have other complaints, but this review is too long already. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't take this game for free. It's incredibly frustrating, and not for good reasons.