Phoning Home starts off with such a fantastic premise and idea. You play as the non-verbal robot, ION who has crashed on an alien planet. Along with your talkative ships AI, you must find a way to survive this strange world and find a way to, well, phone home. You can really see Phoning Home as what would happen if you crossed Wall-E with something like RUST.

On a survival level alone, Phoning Home works surprisingly well. I’m not a fan of survival games because they tend to quickly becomes chores and lose that fun factor that I always look for in a game. Early on in the game Phoning Home works well to limit the pain of collecting and crafting. ION can survive for some time without needing the player to craft things to keep him going.

Because he is a robot this means the survival elements are less stressful than they would be with a human lead. Hell, I’ve played survival games where I would have to stop every five minutes to take a drink of water lest I perish. ION is a tough little bugger, but the game also makes the crafting less intense than most games which places the focus on exploring more than anything early on.

There are only a few materials that you’ll need to craft everything and these are all fairly plentiful. Not only that, but you’ll really only need to worry about crafting Power Cells and Fuel. The former are easy to stock up on while the later lasts for ages and I’ve never come close to running out of fuel yet. The other crafting is repair functions in the event you take a big fall or run across some very annoying baddies.

What I really do enjoy is all the crafting of upgrades for yourself that let you enter, and better tackle new areas of the world. Phoning Home has an end goal (the getting home bit) which already places it above so many other survival games, but the upgrade system is also great and gives you a real incentive to explore, collect and craft. You can simply do what the game wants so you can finish everything, or you can take your time and just live out your little robotic life exploring at your own pace.

“Phoning Home has a lot of potential that is almost completely negated when it turns into a 20 hour escort mission…”

The game also looks fantastic and plays incredible well. ION is simple to control and the world is at your disposal in terms of travel. You have thrusters so you’ll be able to get places easily and it’s a lot of fun trying to push ION to the limit trying to get someplace new. But this also brings up the games first issue with the world itself. It’s quite easy to break things, glitch the envirnment and end up someplace you shouldn’t be as it’s quite easy to force the world to work around you. Not really a huge deal until I talk about the big thing I’ve ignored so far –ANI.

Phoning Home decides to give you a partner early on in the form of another crashed ship and its robot ANI. I wasn’t kidding when I made the Wall-E reference at the start of this review. She is in the game to give you something to take care of and will follow you around during your travels helping you out a little bit (not worth the effort in care though). The idea is fine, but the execution nearly derails the entire experience as ANI does a great deal to negate the open-world nature of the game.

Finding ANI means you’ll now have to keep two robots in good condition. The problem is that ANI is pretty weak and will suffer damage at an alarming rate. This wouldn’t be an issue, but she has a Corrosion level that can never be repaired once it goes about 25%. All you can do it continue to craft Corrosion Plates to reduce the damage. This is only made worse during areas where sandstorms happen at random with no way to find shelter. A single rogue storm can wreak havoc on ANI is you aren’t near a building you can wait it out in. This means ANI will eventually die and cause an end game situation.

But even more of an issue is the pathfinding problems ANI has. Early on in the game you can go and do whatever you want. If you see a ridge on the horizon you can go and explore it, even using the world to your advantage to get up it at times. But ANI won’t do a damn thing right in this regard as she has no thrusters and can only roll about. She is also really slow and has a really bad habit of getting stuck everywhere is you aren’t paying attention. The developers seemed to know this as they added a tool that lets you grab here and move her about like a magnet.

ANI as a character is fine, but she is dumb as rocks. You might take ION over a ridge but ANI simply won’t follow you. And even if she does she will probably take the long way around any location. It’s almost as if her pathfinding was hardcoded into the game and she won’t ever deviate from the path the game has assigned her. This means you’ll be turning around every few seconds just to make sure she is there. This also means that the shortest and most direct path someplace is impossible because ANI won’t follow you and just sit there staring at you like an idiot. Phoning Home starts off so amazing and yet so quickly turns into a babysitting simulator.

The game is a huge escort mission, but the world wasn’t designed for escorting. The game is already a bit on the slow side, but ANI takes it down to a darn near crawl. It got so bad that I nearly fell asleep because it was so monotonous. This is all a real shame because there was so much promise to the game very early on before it turned into a walking simulator. I spent a few hours early in the desert area simply trying to find the path up the mountains that the game wanted me to use. Sure, I could get to where I needed to on my own, but ANI simply would sit still, me looking down at her realizing this isn’t the path the games wants me to take to the objective.

You do have a compass that keeps track of everything, but there is no distance markers so you’ll have no idea how far you’ll have to go. Even worse is that you’ll never know how far ANI is from you, and if you lose her you’ll be wasting tons of time backtracking to find her. Phoning Home ends up shooting itself in the foot which is a shame because there is so much promise here. The best advice I can give is to save at least every fifteen minutes because the game can go fubar in an instant, ,ostly becasuse of ANI. Oh, and you can’t simply leave ANI behind and explore (even if she tells you to) lest she get attacked, lost, or get stuck with no way of getting out or traveling to you location forcing a load.

Phoning Home is a game built on a fantastic premise and idea, but just never rises above it own self-imposed limitations. It’s a shame because the game has a really interesting story that is told between the AI in the crashed ships, but it’s just not enough to keep you going. Survival games are already at a disadvantage when I play them, but then turn it into a huge escort mission and it’s almost too much. This one is for harcore survival game fans only.

“Phoning Home has a lot of potential that is almost completely negated when it turns into a 20 hour escort mission…”

Final Score:
2.5/5

About Author

J. Luis

J. Luis is the current Editor-In-Chief here at GAMbIT. With a background in investigative journalism his work encompasses the pop-culture spectrum here, but he also works in the political spectrum for other organizations.

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