With a lot of the games I’ve had the privilege to review lately, I feel like the expectations for an “Early Access” title have been raised; many games that I have personally played using this system, which Steam provided to give games some pre-launch community support and testing, feel like they’re in surprisingly solid states, often just missing a final chapter or a few characters and being more or less in good, working order.
Horizon Journey, in an almost refreshing change of pace, not only felt way more unfinished than many of these Early Access games, but it actually went a bit too far in the other direction, feeling like a game that could have used a lot more internal testing before being released to the public.
Horizon Journey is a base-building survival game set on Mars, with the setting being a near-future, grounded-in-reality attempt to colonize the red giant. The game is built in the Unreal Engine and appears to be the first publication of a seemingly small indie game studio. That second part is important, because you’re going to notice it right away when you give the game a try.
Simply put, Horizon Journey is an incomplete title, riddled with bugs and plagued with poor design choices. There is no other way to put it, and the game’s flaws are so apparent and critically impacting of the experience that the title simply feels like it wasn’t ready to be released, even into Early Access.
I struggle to decide where to even begin to describe the game’s flaws. Even the title menu struck me as an unfortunate design choice; the user interface isn’t great, a problem that will persist throughout the game, and it moves along with your mouse. There are reports, which don’t surprise me, of users getting motion sick in this menu and being unable to access certain options on ultrawide monitors.
The Unreal Engine is notorious for poor optimization when it comes to indie developers, and Horizon Journey is no different. Despite running the game on what I’ll only describe as a professional machine, the game had severe frame rate drops. These drops seemed to happen around specific assets or parts of the map, which told me that it is likely a triangle count issue on certain models or probably something wrong with the game’s physics simulation just below the surface. I could be wrong about both of these things, but going from 40 fps (the highest I could achieve) to 15 in one small section of the map wasn’t ideal.
The game’s crafting system is unremarkable and dull, with each resource you gather just amounting to a checklist that allows the press of a button without any nuanced changes or immersive additions to make it intuitive. While this is rather normal for this type of game, the poor UI really makes the process feel extra dull; there are no bars showing you how long something has to craft, no sounds or interaction when an item is done or picked up, and every aspect of the HUD is a boring, monocolor white PNG that can make navigating your inventory a bit tedious.
Buildings and rocks float and spawn disconnected, which can make navigation, especially in the starting base that you’re supposed to access to continue the story, difficult; this building, for me, spawned with hallway walls clipping through and blocking the entrance doors, almost barring me from getting in and completing the tutorial.
Alongside these major bugs are hosts of tiny issues, such as driving the rover being almost slower than walking, thanks to the vehicle’s inability to climb slopes. Weather has no sound; it simply appears, sort of like the short transition to day or night, or the quick deaths you get when you fail to get a warning for being very low on oxygen (you do get an obvious warning about two minutes before this happens, but not immediately before). Every single ore piece that litters the environment is highlighted with an obtrusive HUD element, and said resources are scattered all over the place rather than strictly tied to regions to incentivize exploration and progression. At some point, I found myself randomly unable to pick up objects, and I couldn’t drop things from my inventory, leading to it becoming cluttered and unusable.
These and other problems add up to make the game an unplayable mess, which desperately needed more time testing internally.
I won’t lie to you, reader, I didn’t get incredibly far into the game. I stopped playing once I found myself softlocked out of continuing, unable to build my base because my inventory was full, and I didn’t have the right materials to continue building, and was unable for some reason to drop items from my inventory. This wasn’t very far into the game, but I get a feeling it’s quite a bit further than a lot of players will get.
All of this would be much more forgivable if not for the fact that the game seems to advertise itself deceptively. Screenshots and videos don’t reflect the state of the game, or even what the graphics really look like in-engine. I want to give the developers the benefit of the doubt here and hope that this wasn’t done intentionally to increase game sales.
That being said, I did find the game’s night sky to be incredible. I think maybe the game did once look like the promotional material in an earlier build, but changes had to be made to keep the frame rate from being totally unplayable.
This is usually the part of my review where I say “despite all of these problems, the game has potential.” If I’m being completely honest, though, I don’t know if it does. I do believe the developers have it in them to turn around the game’s many bugs and even change some of the odder design choices to make a truly functional crafting survival game. However, in my humble opinion, the concept itself of a low-sci-fi survival-crafting game on Mars, lacking any unique visual flair or mechanics, is kind of uninspired. If the game had a complete turnaround, I’m sure it would find its audience, but I don’t imagine it would be anything spectacular or stand out from similar titles in the genre.
Horizon Journey needs work. It has a long way to go before a full release, and probably should have spent more time in internal testing before being released. I hope the developers manage to fix the game’s many problems, and I hope they end up finding their audience. As it currently stands, however, I do not recommend purchasing the game until at least the issues outlined in this review are fixed.
Pros:
- The bare bones of a generic crafting game, with a low-sci-fi Martian exploration aesthetic
- The developers seem to be listening to community feedback, so there is promise for many of the highlighted issues to be fixed
Cons:
- Numerous bugs and performance issues
- Terrible UI design
- Unintuitive crafting system
- Odd game design choices that make the experience hard to engage with
- Misleading promotional material
- Overall, a game that was not ready for release… even into Early Access.
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