Revenge of the Savage Planet Review - Corporate Improvement In Action
You really can’t trust these big giant corporations, can you? When Alta Interglobal acquired Kindred Technologies and your contract, they sent you a nice letter telling you that you were part of the family, that they were excited to have you as part of the team that would be seeding the stars with new colonies for the people of Earth, helping to spread humanity throughout the stars. Everything you needed would be teleported to your designated planet, ready for your arrival, so you could hit the ground running and get the place ready for the colonists. Oh, by the way, teleporting people turns them into a big puddle of goo, so you had to go the long way. 100 years of cryo-sleep later, here you are, fired and abandoned with nothing but an A.I. drone to keep you company on this unexplored planet filled with weird and deadly creatures everywhere you look.
In crafting their follow-up to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, Raccoon Logic decided they were not quite done with the ‘stranded on an alien planet and fighting for survival’ game type. Instead, they have developed a grand adventure that improves on the original in almost every way. There is still a plethora of strange alien creatures that will try to kill you, but this time, you must survive as you explore four different worlds in your quest to find a way back home.
In playing the original for the review here at Player 2, I enjoyed my experience, but the bare bones narrative and struggle in reading subtitles while combating the final boss took a bit of the shine off the final product. Raccoon Logic have learned from the experience and crafted a multi-tiered story that plays out over your journey. Fortunately, there are no alien languages that necessitate the reading of subtitles while zigging and zagging your way through a boss fight. Included amongst the narrative are side quests that allow access to greater upgrades, along with the opportunity to expose the capitalist shenanigans of your former employer, and take a stab at micro-transactions for good measure.
As mentioned, Revenge of the Savage Planet will shoot you to other planets, literally through the magical workings of the Planet Canon, forcing you to overcome each planet’s biomes to find all the upgrades and information you need to figure out the identity of the mysterious former explorer that keeps sending you messages and a way to potentially get yourself back to Earth. Much like in Journey to the Savage Planet, the alien worlds are full of colour and life. The alien creatures will all eventually spawn back in, stopping the world from ever being truly empty and making sure you never get too lost in your thoughts and stop paying attention.
A handy network of teleporters is spread throughout each of the worlds, and once found, will allow you to instantly travel between your base and any teleporter that you have activated. Hidden amongst the various corners of each world are various collectible power-ups to be found and retrieved, from the orange goo that will boost your health and stamina permanently, to the printer slurry needed to 3D print all your fancy upgrades. In Metroidvania-like fashion, there will be lots of backtracking between worlds to grab these collectibles as you get more upgrades.
Thankfully, one of the other big improvements over the original is a map that will retain the locations of any of these collectibles you may come across before you can reach or unlock them. The only negative to the map is that there is no guidance beyond an objective icon when doing missions, and there is no way to place your own waypoints on the map at all. Still, this is a vast improvement on the original and can at least indicate where the player has to go.
There has also been an improvement in the recruitment of space explorers. The powers that be at Alta Interglobal have decided they should be an equal opportunity employer, with both male and female explorers blasted off to the distant stars before being fired and stranded. Though some of these explorers have had it better than others, they instead woke up on their new planet with a companion who is just as unemployed and stranded as they are. Working in partnership with each other you can annihilate damn near any of the various creatures that fill the world, both the cute and squishy and the not so cute and very angry, very aggressive creatures that would love nothing more than to make a snack of your spleen. You can even decide on what style you want your stranded explorer to wear. After all, just because they are abandoned on an alien world does not mean one cannot be fashionable. Luckily, scattered among the planets are other clothing pieces that give explorers more creative freedom to express themselves.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is the perfect example of a development team refining what worked to make a much better game. Pretty much every facet of this game has been an improvement over the original, though the argument could be made that the game is possibly a tad too easy. I only died once in my entire playthrough, and that was because I got swallowed by some tar I could not jump out of. There were a few hairy moments where I almost met my end, but nothing like the amount of bodies shown piling up in the launch trailer.
If you enjoyed your previous journey through an alien planet, then it is a no-brainer that you will enjoy this game. If you are the sort of person who is a fan of golden age sci-fi, the type who wants to explore new locations and kill alien creatures while pondering the morals of your actions and those of multi-national corporations, then Revenge of the Savage Planet is just the type of game to keep you entertained. Bonus: If you have Game Pass, you can try it out for yourself right now.
Revenge of the Savage Planet was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
