Revenge Of The Savage Planet Review

When Journey to the Savage Planet launched back in early 2020, it offered a lighthearted, slapstick satire on corporate evil under the guise of an exploratory sci-fi action platformer. Crash-landed on an uncharted planet as an underequipped and 3D-printable worker, your overseers at Kindred Aerospace were exactly the kind of unfeeling executive types we’re all-too familiar with in the real world – more concerned with making lines go up on a graph than the welfare of expendable ranks or their effect on communities at large 

Revenge of the Savage Planet, a sequel some four years in the making, comes at a time where the games industry is very much feeling the effects of the march of these megacorporations in some pretty big ways. Sweeping acquisitions that beget mass layoffs while companies chase trends and homogenise creative output, if you’re at all invested in the state of things in video games you’ll know that these are stories that permeate the conversation almost daily. So it makes sense that they’d also flow back into the art, in as much an act of catharsis as it is defiance from the folks at the ink end of those big, red markers.

This is exactly how it happened to me…

And so, in Revenge, history is doomed to repeat itself. Kindred Aerospace has been acquired by Alta InterGlobal, an even bigger corporation with an even shinier image. But despite the constant mantra of “Fuelled by Families,” these new bosses of yours are as calculated and cold as ever. On sending you out to scout yet another planet to potentially colonise, your ship carrying the future framework of an entire community is damaged out in space, leaving you stranded planetside. And rather than pay the exorbitant cost of getting you back out, Alta does what big corporations do best and simply relieves you of your employment. Just a bit of right-sizing, some light targeted team adjustments, you know?

For those that soaked up the last game, what follows will be familiar. You’ll run, jump, swing and shoot your way through untamed areas in search of resources and upgrades that’ll let you push even further and, eventually, recover the craft you need to put this fate behind you and go home. This time around there are a handful of distinct planets to hop between on your mission, each with its own flora, fauna and resulting ecosystem that informs traversal and puzzle-solving. This expansion mercifully doesn’t make for a more bloated experience, in fact it’s around the same 10-15 hour commitment as last time, but it definitely adds to the variety.

I’ve seen this prompt before in my teenage years

Rather, the folks at Raccoon Logic have poured all efforts into improving game feel and refining the personality of this goofy sci-fi world. The switch to a third-person camera is transformative not just in how it all plays in the hand but for how much more character can be infused into your minimum-wage spacefarer. Walking and running animations are appropriately over-the-top and can vary wildly depending on whether you’re treading water or sliding on green goo, which looks great and also helps parse your traversal situation on the fly. That’s especially handy against this sequel’s emphasis on goo-based challenges, tasking you with handling numerous types of elemental sludge to affect enemies, solve environmental puzzles or just lay down a slick runway.

Interactions with alien fauna are also a bit deeper than just kicking them around this time, though that’s definitely still an option. It’s now possible to lasso and capture creatures after catching them by surprise or figuring out their weak spots, which affords the ability to research them as well as keep them penned in mini-habitats back at home base. Their designs are even more wild than last time, so it’s nice to be able to visit and interact with tame versions and appreciate them in ways you can’t when they’re trying to kill you. Especially when, out in the wild, the game’s middling and rudimentary shooting mechanics tend to grate.

She’s serving tbh

Like before, progress through Revenge’s quest is only lightly guided, encouraging exploration of every available inch of each planet. It’s billed as a 3D metroidvania, and that’s about bang-on, with plenty of opportunity to retread ground sporting new abilities to reach previously inaccessible points as you blaze your own trail and complete loosely-organised objectives toward your goals of leaving and/or taking down Alta. The elemental goo puzzles are a bit of a treat initially, but by the end you’ll find that the vast majority are the exact same variety of “draw a line of conductive splooge from this electric mushroom to this other one.”

It certainly helps that all of these alien worlds look a million space-bucks. Raccoon Logic has genuinely outdone itself on both the art and tech side with lush worlds full of immense detail and smart use of key UE5 effects that serve the vision. Some may balk at what I believe is a 30FPS target on consoles, including PS5 Pro, but the action here is basic enough that I never felt cheated by a scarcity of frames. It’s all worth it for the spotless presentation.

The studio has also outdone itself on the FMV video messages and parody adverts that charmed in the original game. Production values on these are shockingly significant, hilariously unnecessarily so in many cases, and it just drives home the sense that Raccoon Logic has a lot of fun crafting these games.

Me and bestie

The game’s humour wasn’t always to my taste – I could do without the millennial cringe core humour and fat suits, but then sometimes you’ll get an ad for a kids’ AI-powered companion that outwardly states it’s designed to reflect their own interest back at them, be it baseball or domestic terrorism, and suddenly I’m right back in. At one point, an increasingly-irate Alta CEO puts great effort and expense into erecting a taunting visual gag in your encampment, only to radio in and spell the metaphor out plainly before you’ve had a chance to appreciate it – now that’s AAA.

Final Thoughts

Revenge of the Savage Planet already looked to end on a pitch-perfect note, rewarding the time and effort I’d put into erecting an entire outpost – inclusive of my own customised living quarters and several small zoos – with utter abandonment. But then it managed an even greater late-game twist. One that’s inward-looking, AI-critical and ends on a credits song about shitting and pissing on company time. It’s exactly as dumb and brilliant as that sounds.

Reviewed on PS5 Pro // Review code supplied by publisher

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