"Revenge of the Savage Planet" Review

Publisher: Raccoon Logic

Developer: Raccoon Logic

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

"Well folks, 2020 is shaping up to be a fantastic year for gaming! We have such landmark titles as Doom Eternal coming out in a hot minute, as well as The Last of Us: Part 2 and the long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077 later on! "

These are the words I used to open my review of Journey to the Savage Planet back in February of 2020. For several reasons, I'm going to avoid saying anything about how the rest of 2025 might go, ok? Ok!

Anyway, back in 2020, Journey to the Savage Planet kind of knocked my socks off. For a first project from ex-Ubisoft developers in a studio more or less bound to Google Stadia, the game had an undeniable heart. It also scratched the kind of Metroid Prime itch that nothing else was trying to scratch. From a purely objective standpoint, it wasn't anything to write home about...but as I said many times throughout its review, it was fantastic "for what it {was}". Then Google Stadia predictably shut down, and with it went the studio. But as fate would have it, this wasn't the end for the minds behind Journey to the Savage Planet. The group would rally once again under the name Raccoon Logic after the fall, and now we have the not at all expected sequel: Revenge of the Savage Planet. And I have to say pretty much the same thing I did for the original game...but with "fantastic" replaced with "ok." So, as you can hopefully tell, Revenge of the Savage Planet doesn't quite live up to the highs of its predecessor...but it's still a satisfying enough sc-fi adventure with a lower asking price than usual.

Before I get started talking in earnest, I'm going to say this: from here on out, Journey to the Savage Planet will be shortened to Journey, while this sequel will just be Revenge. Savvy?

I'm not going to pretend that Journey had a killer story or anything like that, but there was some solid intrigue involved with the whole "there wasn't supposed to be anyone else here, why is there an alien structure?" concept. It kept this question hanging overhead that more or less drove things forward. In Revenge, there isn't even something that interesting. It doesn't even have as interesting a backstory. In the original game, you were an employee of Kindred Aerospace: a corporation that prided itself on being the "4th best" interstellar travel company. It's not like that's the kind of thing that ever made me laugh out loud, but it was amusing. In Revenge, you're an employee of the generically evil megacorporation that purchased Kindred. There's no clever tagline on that corporation, it's just big and evil. As an employee of this company, you're launched to a star system 100 years away in order to establish a colony. However, once your ship gets close to the planet you're mean to tackle, it breaks apart and you find yourself with none of your tools. So, the story is essentially just you going around looking for the scattered blueprints of things like your gun, jump packs, etc. There's some mystery involving an unknown voice responsible for the scattering of your equipment, but it's not worth bringing up since I predicted a specific, predictable plot twist at the start of it all...and the mystery didn't even live up to that. All of this is secondary, however. It's not the story that made Journey great, and that's the expectation I had going in to this one. No, what was going to make this one great was the exploration and resource gathering I'd end up doing in order to finally establish the colony of "Nu Florida"....

Which provides an excellent segue into something a bit more pervasive and notably worse than the story: the humor. Humor was a weak-yet-inoffensive part of the first game, but here they really went all-in. And this change is definitely not for the better. It's all about the same level as "Nu Florida" as far as jokes go at best, and it's "fart plants" that do exactly that as you walk by at worst. Then it's an "influencer" character called the shama lama whose catchphrase is "ding dong" and has a program that abbreviates to D.I.A.P.E.R. at even worst! Exacerbating all of this is the deliverer of most of these jokes: your AI drone companion, EKO. It delivers each of these jokes with this smug, self-satisfied tone that just makes it all so much worse...think on the level of "oh, you know, no big deal, just a massive amount of seismic activity that'll swallow us all whole and kill us all to death" and you have a good idea. There is an option to turn the chattiness down, but the screen to do so mentions that turning it all the way off will affect your understanding of the story...and I didn't yet realize that there was no story, so I had to deal with this companion's blabbering throughout, even on "less chatty" mode. Exacerbating this even more is the transition from the first-person camera in Journey to a third-person one here. Now as you run through the environment, you're looking at your little guy character in whatever outfit he's (there's no actual gender specification, so this is a self-insert thing) wearing. Furthermore, he'll be doing the most infuriatingly tryhard comedic run animation you can imagine. It really must be seen to be believed. And as I implied by saying "whatever outfit he's wearing", there's a heavy emphasis on collecting outfits here. They're pointless at best and obnoxious at worst. There's no shortage of big mascot helmets and other things you might find in a Fortnite microtransaction store, and it all feels like it's trying to be ironic, but it's just as obnoxious as if they were actually selling these items. In 2020 I didn't take off any points for the lackluster humor, so it's not like I ultimately care that much if a game's jokes don't land...but here it's all so prevalent that it actively detracts from the experience at times.

When it comes to gameplay, if you liked Journey's loop, you'll like this one. This loop is kind of similar to a Metroivania loop in that you're constantly collecting upgrades in order to open more paths to collect more upgrades, in other words. The tools from the first game are all present and accounted for: bomb fruits, acid balls, bait, portable bounce pads, a little gun, etc. Your primary method of fighting hostile fauna is, of course, your gun. But it's pretty flimsy and there's some auto-aim on by default that actually seems to make hitting a target harder sometimes. Tougher enemies will have things like armor bits that need to be blown up with bomb fruits or shells that need to be dissolved with acid before you whip out your gun, which adds kind of a semi-organic strategy component to the proceedings...but it's nothing new for this saga. There are a couple new additions to the roster to point out, but none of them are particularly inspiring. 

Early on you acquire a rather limp hose (the central joke around which you can probably guess) that you can use to shoot water. This can be used to mop up environmental hazards or defeat certain enemies, and if you don't like using it, you're going to have a bad time. See, the hose isn't just used for water: it's used for three other fluids. Firstly, there's green goo, which can be used to create slippery surfaces. Then, there's lava, which can obviously be used to burn things. Finally, there's electric goo, which isn't inherently electric despite the name. Really, it's more of a "conductive" goo that becomes electrified if it touches electricity. 

The water is basically an inoffensive new tool, but the other liquids just aren't great. I can think of exactly one time that I used the green goo (an optional challenge), and that's it. The lava is pretty much an instant win button in some combat scenarios, but the hose, as I said, is limp, so its range isn't great and you end up burning yourself half the time. The conductive goo is mostly used for puzzles instead of combat, but that doesn't make it any less of a hassle. Every puzzle it's a part of involves using the goo to transfer electricity from an electric mushroom to a conductive mushroom that powers something up, and the issue is the same as the magma. The hose is too limp, so if you've connected the goo to the electricity already, you're going to find yourself getting accidentally zapped over and over again. Furthermore, there's a distinct level of artificial challenge involved with these liquids in that your tanks of each type don't retain their fluid levels between planets. So if you know there's an isolated chest somewhere on planet x that requires lava to open, you can't just keep it in mind when you come across lava on planet y, suck up that lava, then travel to planet x to open the chest. No, you have to locate the various fluid sources on a planet-to-planet basis. You don't have to do this with throwable resources, though, which is weird.

If you were paying attention in that last segment, you probably noticed I alluded to multiple planets, rather than just one. Whether you view that as an unimportant detail, a bit of false advertising, or a statement that only one of these planets is out for any kind of vengeance is up to you...but the fact remains the same: there are actually 4 planets to explore in this game. And while that isn't a huge issue, it defeats the purpose for me. There's a world (or 4) of difference between being stranded on a hostile, unknown planet, and being stranded across 4 planets you can warp between at will. It feels like extended scope for its own sake, when dividing the various biomes across a single planet would've done the trick just fine...this is especially true considering there are a handful of fauna species that repeat across worlds. If it's a matter of loading resources, then why not just have a small loading screen between sections? Functionally speaking, that's what's already there! So, why not just do that? Or failing that, why not have this be Journey to the Savage Galaxy? That already would've been a better name, and they could've kept the multi-world formula! Again, none of this is a big deal, but the overly "comedic" undertones negatively impacted my experience already, so losing out on some of that isolated feeling present in the first game didn't do this sequel any favors. 

Also doing this game no favors is the technical state. It's far from the worst technical package I've ever seen, and it's a damn sight better than the next game I'm reviewing in this way, but it's still weak in ways that matter. Firstly there's the framerate, which has some striking variability. A great deal of the time I experienced a smooth 60fps, but there were also times where it dropped well below 30. There were also times where the action would get hung up for a second or two before resuming, and I believe I had just one crash, but that's one crash too many. By far the biggest concern, though, is the bugged completionism. I 100%-ed the original game, and despite the fact that I liked this one considerably less, I still felt compelled to do the same this time. However, there was one special pathway that was bugged. I was needing to use a remote drone to plug into an outlet behind a wall, and the prompt to plug in never showed up. I exited to the main menu, I exited the game entirely, neither of these things worked. And so, I stopped aiming for completion and put the game down for good. The other day I noticed a patch being uploaded, so while it's true that a fix might come with that patch, it's too little too late. The last thing Revenge had going for it was the autistic joy of completing checklists in a given area, and a lack of polish had taken even that from my experience...man, between this and Doom: The Dark Ages, I'm batting two-for-two on putting games I swear I didn't dislike on blast. 

Anyway, beyond these complaints, I can say that the soundtrack also isn't very good...which may come off as a petty complaint, but it's also very short. There's one single combat piece that plays every time you enter combat, and you enter combat a lot. So you'll constantly be hearing an opening cowboy movie strum as you make your way through the worlds.

On that note, there's another thing I'd like to discuss that isn't exactly technical in nature: the respawning enemies. After a certain amount of time, all enemies respawn where they spawned originally. This isn't inherently a problem, but it is when it happens close to you all the time. See, typically in a system like this, there are checks in place to make sure enemies don't respawn unless you're far away from the spawn point. Not so here. In general there won't be respawns if you're right smack dab in the center of the respawn point, but if you're even a little bit outside of that range, you'll have to re-fight the enemies again every couple of minutes (maybe even more frequently). The range is so minimal that there are entire puzzles wherein you'll have to fight enemies more than once, since you'll be moving from one end of the area to the other. 

Folks, with Revenge I have to reiterate the age-old faint praise damnation: If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one. There was a lot of nostalgia for me in seeing the old art assets I remembered from the original game, and a lot of the busywork was just as satisfying as I remembered...when it wasn't bugged, that is. But even that faint praise doesn't exactly hold up because of the changes made to the formula. I can respect a developer not wanting to do exactly the same thing twice, but every attempt Revenge makes to push the boat out fails. The humor is so ever-present and so weak that it ends up taking everything else down with it, and the third-person camera works in tandem with that humor to make the whole thing feel oddly cheap and stakeless. The new additions to combat are simultaneously unnecessary and actively harmful at times. Then there's the technical fidelity, which is surprisingly low-quality for something that rests so heavily on the laurels of its technically stronger predecessor. If you liked the first one, you'll probably like this one, indeed...but you'll probably like it less. 

When I reviewed the original title, I used my smaller-scale scoring system wherein I double the points off for any given negative. This is used primarily for games that have fewer moving parts, but recently I've been dabbling with the idea of using it on sequels that don't change much. After all, if a sequel is 90% the same as the original and the only new thing it does is terrible, my traditional scale might allow it a 9/10 by default, and we can't have that. So, I'll be staying true to my judgment from 2020 and using my smaller scale system.

Let us review:

Terrible humor - 2.0

Limp hose flaws - 0.5

Technical flaws plus bugged completionism - 2.0

The final score for Revenge of the Savage Planet is...

5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average

Better luck next time, Raccoon Logic, better luck next time.