Five years ago, I spoke on the podcast about how much I enjoyed Journey to the Savage Planet. In the same breath, I resigned myself to accepting that I’d probably never play Typhoon Studios’ follow-up, as they’d just signed with Google Stadia. It felt like it was over before it even started. Despite Typhoon’s closure, most of the team has regrouped as Raccoon Logic, and even more so, their first game is a sequel to Journey. This time, it’s called Revenge of the Savage Planet. A title perhaps dripping with a bit of meta-commentary on their journey through the industry. Regardless, Revenge of the Savage Planet does a lot differently from its predecessor while staying true to its roots in all the right ways.
Employing the same cynical tone of Journey, Revenge of the Savage Planet has you playing as an employee of a corporate space-faring overlord made redundant mid-flight. You crash land on a planet on the far edge of space, equipment gone and barely any support. Your goal is to gear up and take the fight back to Earth, getting revenge on the corporation that has essentially left you for dead. It’s a simple story dripping with acerbic wit. However, I have to admit it’s probably my least favourite thing about Revenge of the Savage Planet.
A large part of this feeling is that the comedy in Revenge of the Savage Planet just does not gel with me anymore. I don’t know if my sense of humour has changed or if the writing is different, but so many of the comments made by my new little robotic companion often fell flat and had me rolling my eyes rather than smiling. Humour permeates everything in Revenge of the Savage Planet, including mission text and Robocop-esque live-action videos that play in your base, so this made Revenge of the Savage Planet a rough start for me.
Thankfully, despite my subjective qualms with the tone of the humour, Revenge of the Savage Planet is fun to play. It’s got a lot of the spirit of the previous game that you’d expect from a sequel but tweaked in some clever way. For one, the game is now entirely third-person, which affords the developers a few more creative liberties when designing the game’s many platforming segments. Your adventure also sees you landing on five different planets now, which provides a great deal of variety in the locations you’ll be exploring.
The shift in perspective does mean that Revenge of the Savage Planet does lose a lot of the Metroid Prime-y feel that the original game surprised and captivated me with five years ago. But the new third-person perspective works well, too – not only is your playable character fully customisable now as a result, but their animations are cartoonish and over-the-top, helping bring a lot of charm and nonverbal humour to this otherwise silent protagonist. Of course, it does mean that platforming across these many planets feels better, too, especially as you unlock more and more of the game’s many mobility options.
However, the biggest change in Revenge of the Savage Planet from its predecessor is its structure. You’ll now explore five planets instead of one, and most of them are densely populated with things to do and items to find. Each planet features a distinct look and new enemy types to do battle with, helping to sell them all as their own little biomes. It’s a far cry from the big, more intricately designed areas in the previous game, though it does mean there is a lot more variety in the places you visit, which was a huge issue I had with Journey.
This change in perspective and level design does mean that Revenge of the Savage Planet feels closer to games like Banjo-Kazooie or Yooka-Laylee with a dash of Metroid thrown in. As you progress through the game, you’ll research new abilities, often allowing you to find new goodies if you backtrack. Of course, you don’t have to backtrack if you don’t want to, but should you wish to partake, Revenge of the Savage Planet feels like a much better-honed modern collect-a-thon than many of the ones that flooded the market so many years ago.
But the real appeal here is just how dense each planet is. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be gunning towards a primary objective, only to be sidelined by another piece of hardware for my 3D printer to find, which in itself required me to go and find some other components to help solve the puzzle associated with it. I bang on about this in many open design games, but the exploration in Revenge does two things right – it feels organic and it’s dense enough to be distracting in all the right ways.
Similarly, the game’s combat is just as smart with how it’s expanded upon. Where I had issues with the previous game’s simplistic combat, Revenge of the Savage Planet offers you many more tools to battle with. Standard weapons are all here, but other things, like lava ooze and electrical ooze, can be used in battle but also serve a purpose in solving the many challenges the game throws at you. You can even telekinetically (or, I should say, magnetically) pick up and throw certain objects around now too. Enemies all have weak points now, allowing you to dull them so that you can capture them or hit them with everything you’ve got. It’s still simple but just enough of a step above Journey to remain interesting.
The progression system is essentially the same as Journey – you’ll often have to go and find a blueprint or some components, feed them into a 3D printer, and then enjoy whatever benefits the component brings. In Revenge, many upgrades are tied to researching certain animals – which you can essentially “capture” using a whip you’re given early in the game. While I appreciate this aspect of the game and love the way an enemy’s attack might somehow be translated into a new powerup for your player, they’ve got real-world waiting times attached to them. I don’t see the point of these – they’re too long to wait around but, at the same time, too short to go and do something else. They’re a minor nitpick, but they halt the game’s pacing fairly quickly and in a rather jarring way.
Like Journey, Revenge of the Savage Planet can also be played with a friend. You can still play online with somebody else and even better, there is crossplay support. New to Revenge is the ability to play the game split-screen on the same console, which I didn’t know I needed until now. The game’s physics, weaponry and general objective variety can lead to some pretty funny situations, which is always a good sign of a co-op game. That being said, only the host keeps progress, which is the standard for these types of co-op experiences but still disappointing especially as this was an issue I had with Journey all the way back, too.
From a presentation perspective, Revenge keeps the colourful and vibrant art direction that Journey employed, though this looks much better in many ways. For one, all of the worlds are vibrant and lush, with each of them having their own distinct look while carrying that cartoonish whimsy about them. The shift to the third person also brings with it some incredible animations, which look like they’ve been lifted out of a Saturday morning cartoon with how wacky and expressive they are. All of this comes together with some solid performance to offer up a slickly presented space-faring adventure.
