2020 seems like a lifetime ago, and for the developers of Revenge of the Savage Planet, it probably feels like it’s been even longer. Putting all the real world tumult of the past half decade to one side, Raccoon Logic was known as Typhoon Studios at the time and just on the cusp of releasing their debut title, Journey to the Savage Planet, when Google came along and bought them up, setting them to work on Google’s Stadia streaming platform. While Journey to the Savage Planet still arrived on other consoles, the Stadia port came not long before Google decided they didn’t want to make games anymore, shutting the studio down, and leaving both them, and the Savage Planet IP, lost in space.
For once, this isn’t a tale where the corporate giants won out. The team re-emerged as Raccoon Logic, reacquired their IP, and set about making a sequel that’s even more Savage than the first.
Journey to the Savage Planet was a scouring piece of satire, poking fun at corporate greed and consumerism with genuine humour and wit. It’s fair to say that this is even stronger in the sequel, with the real-world dramas with Google clearly playing into the storytelling, with some of the funniest satirical videos, corporate emails and missives found in gaming.
This theme is no less obvious than during the game’s opening moments, with your plucky space explorer arriving to colonise a new planet under the flag of Alta, an intergalactic mega-corp, only to find that they’re immediately sacked, and that no one else is coming. It’s a poignant and punishing moment for you, your character, and the team, but the clear message from Raccoon Games is that you should just get on with it.
Getting on with it involves shooting a lot of alien creatures, and turning them into a variety of different coloured goo. The menagerie is colourful and creative, and as the name implies, utterly savage. One glimpse and they’ll try to turn you into barbecue, unless you do the same to them first!
Despite the fact that no one is coming to populate the prefabbed units of Nu Florida, you set about building a colony anyway. The core gameplay loop is succinct and satisfying, with a steady stream of missions, upgrades and FMV narrative interludes via the display in your habitat. Fundamentally, this is a Metroidvania, staggering your progress and exploration through upgrades and equipment, and it works as well here as it does anywhere else.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is split into a series of open-world planetary maps. They’re not huge, but they’re packed with plenty of verticality, hidden resources and secrets to keep every moment exciting. I still found myself distracted and wandering off at the merest hint of something else beyond the objective in my eyesight, and though the game can easily be completed in 10 hours, there’s plenty of enjoyment to be had roaming the planets and messing with the creatures within.
One of the biggest changes over the original game is the shift to a third-person viewpoint, and for a while, I wasn’t sold, losing some of the immediacy that goes hand-in-hand – should that be eye-in-eye? – with first-person. Eventually, though, you find that the action is more straightforward, the platforming more precise, and there’s the opportunity for more visual gags when you can see your character on-screen. Primary amongst them is the amazingly cartoonish run animation – seriously, it’s unlikely to be bettered for a long time.
It’s worth noting that for all of the forlorn, lonely and downright downtrodden emotions surging through the opening of the game, you can play the entirety of it in co-op, both online or via splitscreen. As with pretty much any other multiplayer game, it’s better with a friend, sharing in the hilarity or the humiliation at the hands of a giant crab. There are some limitations – you can’t be on separate planets for example, you’re only progressing one player’s save file, and it’s not seamless drop-in, drop-out, so a co-op session is ended if either of you leaves – but they’re minor foibles that don’t diminish any of the fun and frolics.
Whether in co-op or playing solo, the true high point for Revenge of the Savage Planet remains its sense of humour. It regularly had me in fits of laughter, no doubt upsetting the delicate ears of my co-op partner, and everything, from the ‘juiciest burgers in the world’ advert that has people being sprayed in the face by their food, to the Shama Llama’s Ding Dong Academy that pokes merrily at the influencers’ underbelly – featuring an unexpected cameo from Unbox Therapy’s Lewis Hilsenteger – hits home with clear and cutting intent.
Some of the adverts are so ludicrous, so dystopian, that you can’t believe they’d exist, but as with the best satire, the very fact that they’re even vaguely plausible casts a light on the realities of consumerism, greed and corporate irresponsibility in the modern world. You just have to hope that Raccoon Games are wholly wrong about it all, though I do quite fancy a burger.
There’s some rough edges that we hope are patched out soon, a few minor kinks to the collision detection, a point where the animal capture ability wasn’t working and we needed to reload the save, and other technical hitches, but by and large they don’t affect the enjoyment of the game.