2/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of JETT: The Far Shore.

A promising premise let down by clunky execution I’m not having a good run lately. I cut my losses after only one level of Hitman 2, as well as feeling underwhelmed by Psychonauts 2. So I decided to buy, at full price I might add, Jett: The Far Shore, as a relatively sure thing - an indie game by a developer who’s last game I adored. It started off really well. A unique visual style, some really in depth world-building, a surprising level of detail in dialogue/alien language and their culture, and some novel gameplay elements. Ok great, what’s not to like! Well, pretty much just playing it is not to like. The game is beautiful there is no denying that, but omg the gameplay is one of the most annoying and frustrating experiences I’ve had in a while. The controls of the ship take some getting used to. It is quite hard to actually go where you want to go, especially to change your speed - you are either going reallllly fast or reallllly slow. Then when you do master it and try and explore, you are set upon by a myriad of baddies that just annoy you and break your ship. I’m fairly sure I’ve been taught how to fend these off but the game has this infuriating way of telling you really important information via subtitles alone (the dialogue is in an artificial alien language), so I spent so much time trying to both read loads and loads of dialogue telling me what to do, while controlling the ship and trying not to die. It isn’t possible, and so I ended up having apparently been told so much important info but not actually knowing any of it. The dialogue is not only annoying while flying. There are a lot of ‘on foot’ segments where you clumsily walk around (the character is very strange to control - I think “drunk ogre” is a good description of how it feels) and click through sooooo much subtitle-based dialogue. It is so slow and monotonous. I just dreaded any more dialogue to the point I just started skipping through it. Which is a huge shame, as the devs have clearly put so much attention and hard work into the dialogue. Not only is the verbal alien language very impressive, but the dialogue itself really impressively reflects the culture and ambitions of your people and their goals and challenges. It’s just that it is laboured on so heavily that it becomes a chore. The free explore segments are unfulfilling as whatever I did I ended up being attacked by things I didn’t know how to kill or escape. My ship would constantly crash or lose shields or whatnot and I didn’t know how to fix it - I know I’d been told specific plants would help but as mentioned, the way you learn what you need to learn is so complicated and brief it may as well have not happened. There’s even a log book that theoretically you could use to read up on what you’ve learned, but that’s just this huge unordered list that only shows 5 or 6 items in the list at a time, so you end up endlessly scrolling not really knowing what you are looking for. It is all such a shame. The game feels like it has such a powerful vision. The story is (or could be) genuinely interesting, the world has potential for fascination, but the execution and gameplay is so far off the mark that the rest doesn’t matter. And it means all the hard work the devs put into it goes to waste. Oh and the framerate is bloody appalling on my PS4.