Planet Centauri – (P)Review – by K3W3L
Genre: Indie Action Adventure
Developer: Permadeath
Publisher: Permadeath
Release Date: Jun 03, 2016
NOTE: This review was done based on v0.5.11 of the game. Since the review was finished, there has been an update v0.5.12 that has addressed a few of the issues I mentioned in this review. I’m heartened to see that the devs are actively addressing concerns, and I hope they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Before I start off this review, I’d like to give special thanks to my brother, who has invested hundreds of hours into Terraria and Starbound, in order to be able to draw the comparisons elaborated upon in this review.
Planet Centauri is a 2D sandbox RPG game from developer team Permadeath, a game studio based in France (this detail will become significant later on…). It is a new title coming into the genre, coming up against established stalwarts like Terraria and Starbound. Being that I’ve never played Terraria or Starbound in-depth, I will be mostly reviewing Planet Centauri mostly as its own game, while comparisons with Terraria and Starbound will have a separate section devoted to it later on.
My initial impressions of the game varied from being completely amazed, to being somewhat frustrated. All the pictures of the game I’ve seen demonstrated some of the most drop-dead gorgeously amazing pixel art I’ve ever seen in a game. There is a luscious and rich amount of detail in almost everything I’ve seen, and I’m happy to note that this is indeed the case in-game as well.
Starting up the game proved to be a slightly rockier experience, though. I heavily multitask on the computer, alt+tabbing in and out of windows – so in this case I alt+tab out while waiting for it to load. The game will go borderless fullscreen by default, and I find that as a result of tabbing out, it full screens in the bottom right corner of my screen, with everything but the top left of the game cut off. This has been seemingly fixed to an extent, though I’ve recently had it happen to me again.
Usually a quick trip to the options menu can easily fix this without having to restart the game, which brings me to my next point – why on earth is there no options menu when I load up the game? The only way to access it is to create a new character/world (or, if you’ve already done so, load it up) and then go in-game before you can change the settings.
While we’re still on the options menu, the graphics options need work. Fullscreen Windowed is a useless checkbox – the game is still fullscreen windowed even if that option isn’t checked. (While this has been partially fixed in v0.5.12, I can still detect no discernible difference whether Fullscreen Windowed is checked or not.)
Okay, take two. Game finally full screens properly on me and I dive into character creation. There’s a decent number of hair, mouth and eye varieties, but only 2 possible faces, and I have no idea what Extras or Misc changes because there’s only 1 of each. While you can change the hair, skin and eye colours, the gender options are disappointing as all they do is change hairstyle and mouth. I would’ve loved to see more pronounced changes, like the shape of the body, for starters.
Once that’s done, you give your world a name and then create it. Worlds are procedurally generated on creation – no two worlds are entirely the same, though the ones I’ve created have the same biomes in certain directions from the home (respawn) point. That is, if I progress to the left, I eventually hit a snowy biome – if I travel to the right, I end up at a desert biome. It’s a small sample size, though, since I’ve only really checked two worlds.
Accidentally misnamed your character or world? Well, you cannot delete it (yet) to tidy things up. The option, despite text appearing for it in-game, is not actually available.
With character creation done, I was finally in-game, and found myself unable to move left. If you remember what I said about Permadeath being French, they use AZERTY keyboards and have that setting set as default. Weird move really, considering that there are more countries in the world using QWERTY keyboards. I’d recommend QWERTY as default, or at the least, an option to change that setting when you first launch the game. (This has been fixed in v0.5.12.)
To help you ease into the game, there is a ‘diamond’ NPC that gives you tutorial missions to execute. Of course, with it being a sandbox game you can do whatever you want – but the tutorial will help ease new players into the game. I find the balance between hand-holding and acquiring stuff on your own to be okay, although the later missions where I had to get steel bars to craft an alchemy table frustrated me a bit since I had to go out of my way to find iron ore. The latest missions I was stuck on required some crystals, and I did not really have much of a clue where to find those.
The tutorial missions are also helpful for another reason – the controls. There’s just a lot of buttons assigned to bringing up specific menus and, well, stuff. One button for a crafting menu, one button for an inventory menu, and I found the amount of controls to remember for specific actions bordering on the ridiculously large.
There are also some rather obvious flaws with specific text and items. Besides the odd typo (“Monsteres”) and the odd inconsistency (“Chloridians/chloridians” in-game, “Chloriniens” in the trailer, “Chlorinians” on the storepage description!), one of the tutorial missions I had required me to craft an enchantment table. Problem is, in the crafting menu it was called “undefined” and had “No description”. I wasn’t even sure if I was crafting the correct thing I needed. (This was slated to be fixed in v0.5.12, but a check now shows that my enchantment table is still called ‘undefined’.)
Also, when I had to do the tutorial mission to enchant spells, there was an option to type the name of the spell you wanted – but if you typed any letters that were bound to any menus you would end up bringing up the menu. Case in point: I called my spell name Fireball, and as soon as I hit the ‘I’ key the inventory menu pops up and obscures the enchant menu. (You can drag the menus around, which is neat, but this should not even occur in the first place.)
Despite all these issues, I actually found that I really enjoyed the game. It was such a joy to get into – the music was always relaxing and never frantic, combat felt good although enemies on slopes were hard to attack. When you kill enemies, you gain souls, which functions as the currency, and can be used to do anything from opening chests (no keys required) to learning skills (like sprint, dash, and a few combat skills). You lose an amount of these souls when you die, but (thankfully) not your items. Your tools that you craft also seemingly last forever – no need to recraft items due to decay. I genuinely felt I was making good progress the further I progressed, as I upgraded my weapons/armour, built more tools I could use, and expand my house further.
Other stuff that I found really cool about the game – while you don’t need to eat to survive, for most food, eating it for the first time will permanently boost your character’s Hit Points or Stamina Points, depending on the food. The enemies you fight can also have special attributes too – health regeneration, stronger enemies, resistances, etc. There’s also a lot of room to be creative in this game when it comes to building – a wide variety of block shapes you can pick from when you are building your houses or other structures.
While I unfortunately have not managed to play that far into the game to explore some of the features implemented, there are a significant amount of cool ones already built in, and even more interesting features to come. The roadmap details what they plan to implement, and what is already in – it’s a VERY impressive list and I hope they see it through to completion.
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So, how does this stack up to Terraria and Starbound? Here’s what my brother observed:
- Planet Centauri’s controls were the most confusing of the three.
- Planet Centauri worked similarly to Starbound in that it had quests – Terraria lacked a meaningful tutorial. I should note here that the lack of tutorial was what made me gave up on Terraria, and why I’m still playing Planet Centauri after a few hours.
- Planet Centauri had too many menus compared to the other two games.
- The unique enemy modifiers meant Planet Centauri had the most enemy variety of the lot.
- I had two crashes doing rudimentary stuff when I first started, but after that Planet Centauri ran REALLY well. Load times were very minimal and close to non-existent, the longest occurring when a new world was generated. In comparison, Starbound would often lag on my brother’s computer, while Terraria ran well but took some time to load worlds.
- Planet Centauri’s procedurally generated worlds are most similar to Terraria’s.
- Terraria has achievements and cloud support, Starbound has neither (but achievements can be unlocked on the unstable build), and neither does Planet Centauri. Being able to bring worlds with you wherever you play, with the data synced to the cloud, would be nice.
- Terraria is fully feature complete but gets amazing content updates (latest v1.3), Starbound is nearing v1.0…after TWO AND A HALF YEARS in Early Access and with a period of that time blighted by poor communication on how development was progressing, while Planet Centauri is slated to be in Early Access for a year.
Conclusion – if you liked Terraria and Starbound you’d love this game, but remember to bear in mind that this game is not complete story-wise.
Pros:
Beautiful pixel art – on a whole other level from Terraria/Starbound
Calm, atmospheric music
Good introduction tutorials
Regular game saves (which are a must)
Runs and loads VERY smoothly
Satisfying gameplay (combat, farming, mining, etc.)
What’s currently in is very good overall
Cons:
Still in (in fact actually just released in) Early Access
Multiplayer and a LOT of planned features not implemented yet
Too many menus and keypresses
Confusing controls (and poor choice of default control scheme)
Not fully integrated with Steam features
Some obvious flaws (undefined item names), non-standardised text, and typo errors
K3W3L gives Planet Centauri a Drastik Measure 7.3 out of 10 (73).
This has a TON of potential, and, should they not get bogged down in developmental delays like Starbound, this promises to be an amazing game once completed.
