Revenge of the Savage Planet review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Re-reading my review of Journey to the Savage Planet from five years ago, I’m struck by how similar that game is to Revenge of the Savage Planet. Even though there are some key changes – most notably, where the first game was a solo, first-person adventure, Revenge of the Savage Planet is meant to be played in co-op, and you take in all the action from a third-person perspective – in a lot of ways Revenge of the Savage Planet feels like a continuation of Journey to the Savage Planet.

This is both good and bad. On the good side of the ledger, I still remember Journey’s brightly coloured world. Revenge of the Savage Planet brings that back and then some, giving you not just one world to explore, but four whole planets, all of which have their own secrets to uncover. Both games are also heavy on the satire – though Revenge of the Savage Planet’s jokes are definitely more pointed, which makes sense when you consider everything the development team has gone through over the last five years.

On the less-good front, though, some of the problems from the first game also persist. Revenge of the Savage Planet is also a Metroidvania. Even though there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, the gameplay loop of being sent on a quest to unlock new parts of the map and new abilities is just as infuriating here as it was the first time around. In fact, if anything it’s even more annoying here, since you’re constantly being sent back to your home in order to craft or report back or do whatever the game needs you to do to unlock your progress. If you just want to explore the world and have it open up to you naturally, you won’t find that here.

The other problem is that Revenge of the Savage Planet’s combat doesn’t feel any more satisfying than it did the first time around. Your equipment never feels all that powerful; even if the enemies are seldom all that challenging, they’re virtually all hyper-aggressive, so you’ll spend a good chunk of your time attacking everything that moves. It feels sort of at odds with the game’s push to have you scan and catalogue everything – you can only scan so quickly before you need to dodge out of the way of whatever wants to sting, zap, or explode against you. This aggression is even more annoying when the game asks you to lasso and capture wild animals; apart from a couple of creatures that are relatively docile (but that still attack if you touch them), you’re just as likely to get into a fight and blow up a creature as you are to capture it, since so many of them instantly want to attack you.

Having said that, there’s one area where Revenge of the Savage Planet is an undeniable improvement over its predecessor: platforming. I don’t know if it’s just because of the shift from first- to third-person, but jumping from cliff to ledge to rock is a whole lot more satisfying here than it was last time around. You can also cover some pretty impressive distances with your double-jumps, which means that you’ll feel like you’re soaring across the sky, even if you’re just jumping.

Still, that joy of movement doesn’t make up for the other areas where Revenge of the Savage Planet falls short. It’s definitely an improvement over its predecessor, but some annoying design decisions mean that it’s still not as good as it could be.

Raccoon Logic Studios provided us with a Revenge of the Savage Planet PC code for review purposes.