Tasty Planet Forever Reviews

a tasty game

"damn, I seem to have misplaced my video game! I can't find it anywhere" my suspiciously plant shaped stomach:

[strike]Tasty[/strike] Bland planet forever review As the (currently) last and unfortunately worst entry into the Tasty Planet Series, Tasty Planet Forever ended up being a pretty big letdown overall, even more so than Tasty Blue which was already a noticeable step down in quality compared to the first 2 games. It’s main selling point of being a long game only really ends up working against it as most levels just don’t feel as engaging as the previous titles did, instead feeling more like a slog to get through. Starting with the gameplay, this time the game comes in with a whopping 187 total levels, which is almost more than the total amount of levels of all 3 previous games combined! There are a couple caveats to that number though… Firstly, the game is divided into 3 different “styles” of gameplay, each area follows a different character but all of them fall into 1 of the 3 styles. 50% of the game takes place in the “normal” Tasty Planet style, being a top-down perspective on the ground. 25% of the game takes place in the water using the style of Tasty Blue with a 2d side view of the world combined with some water physics. Finally, the last 25% of the game takes place in the air with the same 2d side view but this time no water physics and your character is unaffected by gravity. Because of the constraints on level design imposed by the 2d sideview, generally the water and air levels aren’t as good as the ground levels. Additionally, about half of the levels in the game are “bonus” levels not tied to the main story. These levels require you to get a certain number of stars in order to unlock them, and it is highly likely that you will not get enough stars to unlock more than half of the bonus levels in the game, leading you to be locked out of a significant number of levels. The worst part of this is that the grey goo, who is the most enjoyable character is also the last one to unlock their bonus levels, which means that you are unlikely to get to play ANY of those levels at all. The difficulty for getting the stars also returns with a vengeance. The requirements for stars are now score based instead of time based, but time still contributes massively to score so the overall difference isn’t massive. The real problem lies in the brutal score requirements for many of the levels in order to get 3 stars. The developers did not have much mercy in them when they were designing the game, and since many levels are either heavily reliant on rng or raw mechanical precision it can be very frustrating to try and get 3 stars in many of the levels. The new score based system also allowed the developers to really crack down on the various gimmick levels sprinkled throughout the game, often making those levels very hard to 3 star as well. The game has even less story than Tasty Blue, having barely any at all. Each character gets a comic strip at the start of their area and nothing else. The timeline and pacing is also off, with the world getting destroyed by the 4th character halfway through the game and then the next 3 characters getting hardly big enough to eat continents. I understand that with a game in the style of Tasty Planet it would be hard to keep much of a timeline at all, but it was very jarring to just move on from the earth being eaten halfway through the game like nothing had happened. It also has a significantly more cynical tone to it when it comes to the portrayal of humanity, which I did not enjoy. The artstyle has also gotten even uglier, going for a more prominently grungy look even compared to Tasty Blue, and ending up with a kind of uncanny mix of cartoony yet realistic graphics for a majority of the objects and creatures in the game. All of the new characters are horribly ugly as well, and not nearly as cute or charming as the original grey goo. I also found the UI to generally be inferior to previous games. One of the biggest and most disappointing parts of this game is that it no longer shows you how many things you have eaten at the end of each level, and the gallery has also been removed. This is unforgivable, and is a massive loss overall. Even Tasty Blue still had a gallery despite its other flaws. Atleast the one thing that the developers always seem to get right is the choice of music, having once again selected 4 great tracks to add to the soundtrack. All of them fitting the new theme of the game and helping get you in the mood for consuming everything around you. Mediocre would be the best way to describe this game, it really is just “mid”. The gameplay while offering nothing special is not abhorrently bad, and there is atleast some entertainment to be found in it, but you are probably better off just playing the originals. On release this was a massive disappointment to me, and coming back 7 years later, not much has changed. I would not recommend you play this one, even if you are a fan of the previous games. My recent playthrough took about 5.6 hours so it definitely offers more playtime compared to the others, but the game just lacks the same charm the previous ones had and I don’t feel is worth the increased price.