Revenge of the Savage Planet review

There’s a loop I sometimes struggle with in Metroidvanias. Their idea is simple: gradually give people more powerful tools and abilities to explore worlds with, so that once insurmountable obstacles become, gradually, surmountable. Now you can reach an area you couldn’t before because you can fly, for example. But the problem is fun. By delaying access to things you need to get the most out of a game, you also risk delaying – and perhaps denying – the feeling of fun in it.

Revenge of the Savage Planet follows on from Journey to the Savage Planet from 2020, and it’s very much the same thing again – a garishly bright and colourful, tongue-in-cheek action adventure. In it, you are the outcast employee of a horrid space corporation now stranded on an alien planet, and you must work out how to prosper there. This involves a lot of running and jumping around and splatting goo-filled alien creatures, and using high-tech company gadgetary to scan things and gradually upgrade your stuff.

The biggest difference between the two games is perspective. Revenge of the Savage Planet is third-person whereas Journey to the Savage Planet was first-person, for some reason, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to change it. There’s also a greater emphasis on co-op now, with the advent of split-screen play, as well as online play and cross-platform play. Though I should point out you can perfectly happily play it alone.

You begin Revenge of the Savage Planet not being able to do much. You crash-land on an unfamiliar beach and then, with the help and guidance of your ever-present chatty drone EKO (whose chattiness levels you can decrease, mercifully), learn the basics and equip a starter set of gear. Note: this is not a survival game. You will not chop trees and progress slowly through tiers of equipment, or eat food. But it’s not entirely different. You will mine rocks, although they break apart instantly at the touch of a button, then use the resources to upgrade the capabilities of the equipment you have. For what it’s worth: I almost always seemed to have the resources I needed and rarely had to grind for them.

There’s a large and fun array of toys to use. A jump can become a triple-jump, eventually, an energy whip can be used like a grappling hook, and you can glide, smash down into the ground like a meteor, and grind along energy rails to the top of mountains. You can even hurtle metallic rocks with a kind of magnet thing. But upgrade advancement isn’t freeform; it’s welded to quests and progress in a journal in the game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Revenge of the Savage Planet is a sandbox game with open playgrounds to explore, so quests provide a route through them and give shape to the game. But they get in the way too.

Every time you want to take a step forward, there are several steps sideways to take. For instance, upgrades pertaining to crucial abilities like your jump and the power of your gun involve completing a set of oddball challenges. Can you reflect various projectiles back at enemies, for example, or crash down on and kill three enemies at once? Some of these are fun to pursue but others are a pain in the arse. One challenge – to electrocute five enemies at once – required quite specific factors to be achievable and took me ages to complete, and I would have given up on it had I not needed the upgrades the quest withheld. It wore my patience thin. Main quests are generally more agreeable, but there’s still a sense of having to traipse backwards and forwards in order to complete them – as if the game were stretching its content out. Why do I have to teleport all the way back to base just to initiate research, for example? And why does research have a timer on it?

It doesn’t help in these moments, these legwork moments, that Revenge of the Savage Planet lacks the kind of detail and responsiveness it needs to make the core gameplay fun. This brings us back to my introduction and a feeling that the game needs the upgrades it holds back from you in order to really get going. It’s too slow and trudging to begin with – not helped, I should say, by some significant performance dips on PlayStation 5, particularly in swampy, foggy areas.

To me, worlds like these – worlds with cliffs and gorges and rivers and floating islands – come alive when they become playgrounds for the player, when we’re allowed to hurtle through them at breakneck speed and with tremendous acrobatic capability, when we can delight in traversal rather than wrestle with it. Revenge of the Savage Planet realises some of that exhilaration later on – although not entirely, I have to say – but it’s held back for so long you’ll be worn out by the time you get there. I was.

I don’t want to sound too mean here. There’s plenty about Revenge of the Savage Planet to like. I can see it appealing strongly to a younger audience, or to parents playing with children, for the kind of unfussy and lighthearted kickabout fun it offers. You earn currency in the game to buy machines to customise a base with, not because they offer any gameplay advantage (you get the machines you need for upgrades automatically), but because it’s a fun thing to do. And the machines can do things like give you high fives or a hug. They made me laugh. In fact the game made me laugh a few times; not as much as it would like – it can be quite brash – but there are some wry observations about corporate policy and working life that cut through, and some zingers about video games.

The alien planets are zany places to be, too, filled as they are with wacky creatures who have bottoms for faces, or that run away from you screaming when you approach. It’s a cartoon universe with cartoon sensibilities, bold and kaleidoscopically colourful, and, when you’re grinding an energy rail to the peak of a floating archipelago, it can be breathtaking.

There are good intentions on show all across the game. I like the way you suck up different types of goo in your hose and then deploy it for varying puzzling needs. I like the Zelda-like environmental cues such as telltale cracks in the wall or floors, and the ability to make platforms appear by watering plants, and so on. I can feel the imagination and care and sense of fun that’s been poured into this game, and when it comes together – and often even when it doesn’t – it’s charming.

But it’s the fun part that gets stuck in the tube for me. It’s the moments where I’m prompted to dive down into a lake but then told I can’t swim in it because I need an upgrade in order to do that – a kind of submersible scooter. That’s right: you can be underwater but you’re not allowed to swim until you finish a quest that unlocks your ability to swim. And that’s indicative of the whole experience of Revenge of the Savage Planet for me: it’s not as wild and carefree as it wants to be.

A copy of the game was provided for review by Raccoon Logic.