Review | Journey of Life

LifeisXbox’s Journey of Life review | Journey of Life is a survival game by Hyperion Studio Limited. You are an engineer that has lost everything and is forced to start over with nothing but the clothes you wear. Then your Journey of Life begins, standing all alone with nothing on a beach. If you like chill games that allow you to craft while still looking beautiful, this will totally be your jam! This game is, to be honest, not complete at the time of playing, but I will give it an honest review for the time I spent in it.

We played Journey of Life for 5 hours on PC. This game is exclusively available on Steam.

What we liked!

• Crafting | Crafting is a real joy in this game, when you figure out how to use stuff, it becomes so much fun. It’s also crafting in a way I have never done before. I will explain: you start by running around punching trees, bushes, and rocks to collect your materials, like any other game. But then you click on what you want to craft and it just makes it, slowly. No animation, no nothing, you can do anything meanwhile. That’s the basic stuff. But then you need to build stations. When you try and craft these there will be a white husk of whatever you try to make. You place that husk where you’d like the station to be and then look at it, which shows what materials you need. If you have those, you can pull out your hammer and whack those materials in place! What I mean is this crafting feels better than for example Minecraft for me. It’s more intuitive in the recipes, not in how to use them though… more of that in the did not like part.
• HUD | This is so well done in my opinion, just to show you all I will put a screen of just the HUD showing you how it works. When you are punching for example a bush after a little while materials will drop from it. Then you can, like me, pick them up one by one feeling really annoyed, or you can be an intellectual and press TAB to get your beautiful and handy HUD. As you can see in the bottom left corner, there is a “Nearby” spot. And when materials are close they will show up there! And then don’t be a potato like I was and click them one by one, Shift-click that shit, and move them by stack to your inventory which you can see above the Nearby bit. Then you have all the basic crafting there in the upper right corner. I find this HUD slick and I loved this when I learned how to use it.

Somewhere between

• Visuals | When you first get into the game you will notice this game looks amazing. Especially when you press “C” on your keyboard and go the first-person mode. I loved running to the castle and all other stuff just to look at them. If you don’t press “C” and just play in the third person mode, your character, who you can customize a tiny bit, sometimes looks a bit weird. With that, I mean that some animations just didn’t feel perfect to me yet and I definitely preferred the first-person mode.
• Music | At first I really disliked the music. But after opening it again and giving it a second chance it is quite ok. I really dislike one part in the song that is on repeat, and to be fair, it gets a little much, and very overwhelming when you are trying to figure out the whole game. But if you just stand still and listen, it’s beautiful piano music. So, I recommend when you are learning the game to either just turn it off or lower it by a lot. The violin (I at least think it’s a violin, don’t know for sure) just ruins it for me, but that’s my personal opinion.
  

What we disliked

• There is no help | I had a tough time reviewing Journey of Life because when I started playing, there were no tutorials. However, they did add this in a patch since then. Even though it’s not finished, it’s a step in the right direction. After watching about half an hour of YouTube, I knew how the game worked, and I could finally give it a shot. But I regularly had to recheck the internet or YouTube to continue the game since the tutorials are not finished. I really hated this. Even the tutorials in the game now kind of suck, but at least you’ll know a little bit how to use the stations you build. I had no clue. If any developers read this, please make the tutorial an old-school quest like people are used to. “Collect these and these mats to make an ax. With this axe, you can chop down trees more efficiently. Get mats for a furnace, a furnace is used for melting ore. Melt ore doing this and this”. Now having to go to another tab and it having insufficient info is just horrible and frustrating. I’m not too fond of it when I have to watch YouTube videos to figure out what the hell I’m doing.
• No thrill | There are no enemies or dungeons or whatever of that sort in this game, which made it quite boring after a while for me; yeah, I have my nice house and can craft what I like, what now? I liked having some other stuff to do instead of just running around getting materials. Maybe this will come in the story mode, which is not there yet… The best thing for solo players isn’t in the game on full release? I sincerely question this.
• The game is not finished | As mentioned above, there is no story mode in the game yet. I can get that some of you are like, yeah, but it’s a survival game. Yes, but that part ain’t finished yet either. I just felt like something was missing from the survival mode, like a goal or, as mentioned above, a thrilling encounter or anything that is not the base of a survival game. I need more in a game than just building a house and being able to tell myself: oh boy, I’ve been alive for 134 hours in Journey of Life. No, no, that’s not what survival is to me. They recently added seeds so you can make a farm. Why would you do that after full release? Something so basic? Also, no tutorial on how to get those or how to use them. Just like almost everything else, no explanation.

CONCLUSION

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