Release day review from 60 Second Gamer – a first and quite impressive in my book! I’ll keep this brief (full blog entry coming tomorrow, as I missed out an update over the weekend).
I’ll be honest and admit I hadn’t heard about Journey up until the week of release. I’m a regular reader of www.thesixthaxis.com and they rather graciously put up their review on the day it was available to PS Plus subscribers and gave it a rather glowing 10/10 score. Suffice to say on the basis of the review I paid up my £9.99 (the penny is price rhetoric) and downloaded the game. I played for about 40 minutes last Thursday night but didn’t really sit down to play it properly until Sunday, at which point I played through the rest of the game in one sitting. As gaming experiences go it was a thoroughly entertaining one. The combination of gameplay, soundtrack and story alongside the relatively short running time all combined to form a near perfect gaming experience.
My second run through the game took just 1hr 40m. That included more exploration than my first time through, and also spending over half of that time playing co-op with another random player. That’s one of the great things about this game – there’s no voice chat and you’ve no idea who you’re playing the game with until you’ve finished the story and it tells you what other players you encountered along the way. It leads to a much more collaborative way of playing games and I’d quite like to see more of it in the future. It’s also a very relaxing adventure – you don’t have to think too hard about the puzzles, there aren’t really any enemies, and you can play it through a number of times and have a different experience each time round.
Some might balk at the £10 cost, but the argument I’ve seen elsewhere, specifically The Sixth Axis, is that you spend £15-odd when buying a film on DVD or Blu-Ray and that gives you approximately two hours of entertainment a pop, so why should this be any different? If the experience is good enough then you’ll come back time and again over the next few months and even years, much along the same lines as my viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And Life of Brian. For me at least the £10 cost was justified and I can’t praise it highly enough. You’ll get that impression if you listen to the podcast, it’s essentially just me talking about the game for 20 minutes.
The video review is below, you can also download our podcast about the game at www.randomstoat.com or find 60 Second Gamer on iTunes.