Revenge of the Savage Planet Review: A cheery and densely-packed co-op metroidvania

Revenge of the Savage Planet sets out to do a lot of things, and it succeeds at nearly all of them. It’s a metroidvania, but there are survival elements, and a potentially quite elaborate combat system based on its variously-powered goo, which is also used for puzzle-solving.

There’s a creature-capturing mechanic, and a resource-harvesting system, a lot of actually quite good third-person platforming and a base-building system. All of it is rewarding to play and beautifully animated and often quite wittily presented – but Revenge of the Savage Planet also wants to be capital-F Funny, and that is by far its most wearing feature. The enjoyment of exploration is set against the sensation of being trapped in the front row of a relentlessly C-tier standup routine.

The foundational gag is that you’re a worker-drone colonist who’s been frozen and flung into space, only to crash-land and discover that your saccharine company onboarding video is followed by another equally insincere one announcing your termination. You’ve then got to harvest your gear from the surrounding planets, tame the environment, build a base, and cobble together a ship that’ll take you home, to a backdrop of heavy-handed gags about corporate process.

The meat of this is exploration in the traditional metroidvania style, as you sally forth into what becomes a series of different planets, each with different brightly-coloured biomes. Your underpowered laser pop-gun compels you to quickly learn and exploit environmental damage and creature attack patterns, and you graduate to an energy whip plus goo-based attacks that add lava, slime, or glue. The latter is electrically conductive, which means it can be used to solve puzzles involving inexplicably electrified mushrooms, as well as zap more annoying enemies.

Revenge of the Savage Planet being a metroidvania, the early stages are marked by repeated deaths as you work out what’s survivable and what will require you to return with a better weapon and an unlocked dash ability, but it’s possible to run away from most misjudgements and the game is notably committed to ensuring you see as much of it as possible, to the point of literal (neon) signposting for some of the myriad side missions.

The rare boss battles are straightforward affairs that can be understood and defeated quickly, rather than through relentless grinding. You can unlock zipline-style shortcuts to and from the most distant climbs, and any particularly arduous platforming challenge will spare you the worst of the enemy respawns until you reach the goal. The combat is generous by default, too, with default lock-on, easily-read enemy attack patterns, and your scan tool highlighting weak spots.

Combat is not particularly artful, but the different effects of your collection of gooey grenades does mix things up a bit, as does yeeting explosive critters into larger ones. Abusing the lock-on to chain the cowbell clangs you get from hitting a weak spot is cheap but rewarding, and unlocking abilities to bat back incoming projectiles (with a sassy wrist-flap) or deliver armour-shredding ground pounds makes taking on a few larger enemies quite satisfying.

Unfortunately, it’s more common to be swarmed, even outside of the wave-attack challenges required to access certain mission goals. While it’s notionally possible to play the systems off against each other, in practice, you just end up wildly circle-strafing trying to trigger an environmental hazard in a way that’ll thin the herd. It’s not mindless, but it’s more flail than finesse and consequently, not particularly enjoyable unless you have the comedy bonus of a co-op partner.

“The enjoyment of exploration is set against the sensation of being trapped in the front row of a relentlessly C-tier standup routine.”

It is, however, easy to beat and move on to the next thing, and Revenge of the Savage Planet always has the next thing on hand. You’re rewarded with upgrades for scanning things, and resources for killing things, and lassoing creatures grants both research benefits and a version of them in your increasingly extensive petting zoo back in the base. Cash drops found on crash sites can be spent on a startlingly comprehensive set of cosmetic upgrades to your living quarters, enabling you to craft the kitchen design that Starfleet was too cowardly to deploy.

The steady flow of upgrades granted by the twelve or so hours of main narrative, paired with an endless supply of faintly satisfying busywork, means that it’s very easy to spend time mopping up different challenges and returning to zones with your latest unlock to see what’s accessible this time.

Revenge of the Savage Planet is also funny, to a point, cramming gags of varying quality into every bit of interface text and using the switch to third-person perspective (from the original game’s first-person) to play up physical comedy too. Your character’s goofy default strut, distressing fall-damage recovery, and collection of natty unlockable outfits all raise a smile thanks to top-notch character animation.

The problem is that it’s backed by thuddingly overblown corporate satire that makes Dilbert look like Dickens. The story is mostly expressed by a series of over-saturated live-action video skits that look like LazyTown meets Business Studies, interspersed with dystopian product ads and supported by various email messages in a tone of cheerily sociopathic business-speak. This is not a difficult target for comedy, and some of the relentless gags do raise a laugh, but the hit rate is low, and eventually even skipping through it becomes a chore.

This desperate mugging stands in contrast to the game’s other features, which are delivered with so light a touch as to seem effortless. The worlds are brightly coloured and carefully detailed, and largely a delight to be in.

The town of nu-Florida you gradually assemble (Population: 1) has a pleasing intergalactic-trailer-park vibe. The animals are just the right blend of Pixar and Play-Doh to be memorable but also murderable without troubling your conscience. And the horizons extend at just the right rate, so it almost always feels like you’re exploring and discovering on the way to the next mission marker, rather than grinding away to unlock something.

The sledgehammer satire is the game’s only true bum note, in every sense of the term. It also makes it a bit less likely you’ll use the otherwise highly accessible co-op play with the youngest kids, unless you want to be explaining the birds and bees because of the TV spot for invertebrate prostitutes, and it seems unlikely the gags about compliance training will land for the under-25s either.

Playing co-op is doubtless the best way to experience Revenge of the Savage Planet, ideally with someone old enough to have experienced their first pathologically insincere restructuring announcement, but it’s still a solid adventure full of exploration and entertainment for a solo player.