A review.
Today’s review is thanks to a key provided by Raccoon Logic Studios. Revenge of the Savage Planet is also available on Game Pass.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is the sequel to Journey to the Savage Planet, a game that I enjoyed and admittedly never finished. The original was a first person shooter and if you haven’t played it yet I highly recommend that you do so. It is not required reading to understand the sequel. Revenge meanwhile is a third person platformer that probably brings back a lot of what people enjoyed from the original. Like the scathing commentary on capitalism.
The plot of the game is simple; you are sent out on a hundred year journey through space only to discover upon landing on your designated planet that the company has been bought out and you’ve been laid off during your long sleep and your project has been cancelled by the new owners. So you’ll have to scavenge for supplies and get your ship in working shape so you can get back home and probably beat the crap out of some overstuffed CEO. Or commit corporate espionage I guess. You get some help from an old friend along the way. RIP Adrian Burhop.
I would describe Revenge as a metroidvania of sorts. You have multiple planets you end up unlocking access to and the whole goal is to get more upgrades so you can access different parts of the map and get more upgrades to access more parts of more maps. The game itself is not particularly difficult, especially since you gobble down tons of items that boost your max health and stamina pretty quickly. Much like Journey it’s really about enjoying the world the developers have built with its wacky characters and exaggerated premise.
You track down schematics and resources to craft upgrades to make it easier to track down schematics and resources to craft upgrades. I never had the problem of not having enough resources because there’s tons of it laying around and unless you make a beeline from quest to quest with no collection in between you’ll be fine the moment the game asks you to build an upgrade.
Revenge is a pretty darn good looking game and one that’s fun to run around in. Collectathon gamers will appreciate the massive quantity of things to run around collecting and people who hate puzzles will be relieved to know that they aren’t exactly complex. You eventually get the ability to grapple anywhere and get your own glider, making travel a breeze. And every planet has multiple teleporters so if you need to get to a specific spot it’s usually not much of a trek.
Enemies in Revenge are much more of a nuisance than a challenge. I really started to get annoyed with the combat on the tail end, and it wasn’t because of the mechanics themselves. It is grating and annoying when certain enemies don’t die but simply regenerate after a while, and you’re trying to figure out vague directions for a puzzle only to have the same two or three enemies come back time after time after time. There are also zones where certain enemies endlessly spawn in no matter how many you kill. Some seem to exist for no other reason than to be annoying, being grouped in large numbers in a small space with attacks that stun you and way too big health pools.
Revenge is also occasionally vague to the point of being downright misleading. For instance there’s a side-quest where you have to kick five enemies into quicksand. You’re supposed to kick them into tar sand, which confused me because the game outright describes the tar sand as “not quicksand” so I assumed I had to find somewhere else for the mission. Some of the objectives are downright tedious, like shocking five enemies at once. The problem here is technical, the game doesn’t shock enemies past a close distance from your character even if they are standing on top of conductive material. So you can blanket a whole area with the gel needed to electrocute just to watch the enemies in the distance not react at all.
Revenge took me about fourteen hours to complete, and I’m sure if I went back and grabbed all the collectibles I’d get another two hours or so out of it. It is not a premium-tier game, the regular version will set you back forty bucks. I found it to be charming and fun for the time that I played and I kinda hope the folks at Raccoon Logic add back a first person mode to make it feel more like Journey.
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