There’s something aboutscience-fictionthat lends itself so nicely to comedy, more so than most other genres. From the tongue-in-cheek nature of earlyStar Trek, to the wit and whimsy ofDoctor Who, all the way down to the unbridled absurdity ofRick and Morty, we’ve seen so many examples over the decades of this very idea.
Maybe it’s the fact that sci-fi is so abstract and unknown that writers in this area are able to truly get as weird as they could possibly please, and no one can tell them otherwise. Sure, a planet full of wizards with laser swords sounds kind of insane, but it could be out there somewhere.
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Revenge Of The Savage Planetthrives right in that same pocket. As a sci-fi video game, it’s clear that it’s a title aimed towards anyone who grew up wanting to travel to the stars before realizing that we’ve simply been born too early in humanity’s timeline to ever do so.
I mean, shoot. I myself am the type of person that gets emotional on theAvatarride atDisneyWorld, because it feels like the closest I’ll ever personally get to being able to experience life on another planet. Truly, I love a good piece of science-fiction media that transports me to places beyond what my Earthling brain could ever concoct on its own.
After rolling credits onRevenge Of The Savage Planet, I’m happy to report that it does absolutely possess a great spirit of spacey exploration combined with one of the wackiest senses of humor I’ve ever seen in a video game.
Is it perfect? No. Did it make me emotional by the end, grateful that I was able to experience “life” on these beautiful planets at least for a moment? Again nah, not really. I did, however, have a blast pretty consistently playing this humorous take on interplanetary colonization, and I think you would too.
Let’s get into the good, the bad, and the goofy.
Absurdist Corpo Sci-Fi Satire
Revenge Of The Savage Planetis a sequel to 2020sJourney To The Savage Planet, and shares plenty of absurdist DNA with its predecessor. Like the original, your astronaut avatar has been flung into deep space to find another planet suitable for human colonization.
In the first game, you worked for Kindred Aerospace and its…interestingCEO, Martin Tweed. This time around, in a hilarious and apt twist of corporate satire, Kindred has been acquired by a giant holding group called Alta.
With a perceived shared desire to settle the galaxy, this business partnership made enough sense initially, so you have agreed to work for Alta and follow their planetary colonization training protocols in order to aid humanity in establishing life on various alien planets.
It’s a commentary about big corporations and their unique ability to treat humans as numbers instead of individuals.
Alta puts you into cryo-sleep for 107 years as you travel to your first destination, and during this journey, they shutter and close Kindred, scatter your gear all over the planet system you’re visiting, and fire you from the company as you slumber.
Like the best satirical comedies, you may probably imagine this exact scenario playing out in our near-ish future once we become starbound as a species. It’s a commentary about big corporations and their unique ability to treat humans as numbers instead of individuals, and it’s executed pretty brilliantly throughout the game.
This even includes online corporate training modules and quizzes that give you bad scores if you don’t blatantly side with everything the company shoves down your throat. There’s more to the story along the way, and a secret, shadowy figure behind many of its other events, but I won’t get into those spoilers here—as fun as the reveal ultimately is.
Revenge Of The Savage Planetalso dives headfirst into how starved for attention and Tik-Tok-ified humanity could become by this point in the future. It’s jam-packed with mostly hilarious, well-acted, live-actioncommercials and product placements that feel straight out of anI Think You Should Leavesketch.
There’s even a bonus questline that prompts you to take selfies at sixteen different locations throughout the game to gain as many clicks and subs as possible on your way to becoming the next big influencer.
I can’t stress enough just how unhinged and absurd these ads get, ranging from a burger so juicy it perpetually squirts all over your face as you eat it, to a toilet seat that drops your waste onto your boss' head, and a traveling mansion on monster truck wheels.
(Inter)Stellar Presentation With So-So Performance
Complete chaos from the narrative perspective of the game aside,Revenge Of The Savage Planetreally leans heavily into genuine beauty with the design of its four explorable planets.
You’ll scan and catalog every plant and creature within lush jungles, harsh deserts, massive volcanoes, and everything else in between.Each planet is consistently awesome to look at, and you’ll surely find yourself just stopping and staring plenty of times at a particularly pretty vista in the game.
The creature design is where things quickly dive back into the realm of zany humor, featuring giant raccoon heads with tiny feet, monkeys with actual butts for faces, and little green chickens that run screaming back and forth, their hilarious cries fading into the distance of your sound system all the while.
We should also address this game’s shift to the third-person perspective in comparison to the original title being an FPS experience. Third-person was undoubtedly the better option here, as you’re now able to see each and every hilarious animation your character makes as you interact with the world.
Absolutely everything from the presentation side of things is appropriately weird, charming, beautiful, and hilarious.
You walk, run, jump, swim, and emote like a Looney Tunes character, and the game is all the more charming and memorable for it. Truly, I think alotof what makes this game tick would be completely lost if the devs opted for the same first-person view once again.
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Absolutely everything from the presentation side of things is appropriately weird, charming, beautiful, and hilarious. The sound design of every gadget is perfect, and the wacky, western-tinged electronic soundtrack is a truly great backdrop for all the on-screen action. There’s even a song about taking 45 minutes in the bathroom at work and getting paid for it. Heck yeah.
You also have plenty of fun ways to customize your character, with about a dozen outfits to unlock and several color shader options to make everything look exactly how you want. These suits all seriously look awesome in their sci-fi design, and I loved trying them all on to mix and match my own personal set. You also have some hilarious selections for your character’s voice, including various humans, dogs, raccoons, and anime characters.
On the more unfortunate side of things, this awesome presentation does not consistently translate to stable performance. In fact, I’m sad to report thatI had some pretty big issues with chugging and framerate drops throughout a lot of my experience.
The game never crashed (though I did softlock once), but the inconsistencies here did make an occasional platforming section extra frustrating, or a gunfight all the harder to manage. I’m totally fine with performance dips here and there, but not at the expense of the actual gameplay success chance for the player. Unfortunately,Revenge Of The Savage Planetwas a repeat offender in this area.
There’s even a line of dialogue from yourrobotcompanion, EKO, once you reach the top of a detailed mountain with a gorgeous vista as it sarcastically chirps out, “Framerate-destroying views everywhere.” Whilethe self-awareness is appreciatedand made me chuckle, I’m also not super confident in how much better the game is ultimately going to be optimized if these problems are literally written into the game’s script.
I had other minor performance annoyances here and there, too. A couple of times, a creature I needed to capture for a quest genuinely would not spawn at its map marker as intended until I reloaded the game a couple of times. Other times, my map marker on my compass would simply vanish for no reason until another reload.
Hopefully most of these things are addressed in post-launch patches, but I obviously cannot speak to any of them here.
Mostly Fun Gameplay That’s Stuck Between Worlds
Revenge Of The Savage Planetis both planetary exploration gameplay mixed with gunplay combat. Unfortunately, it does one of these things better than the other.
You only acquire one pistol in the game, and although it can be upgraded to having a charge shot, there’s not too much else to it in the heat of a battle. You’ll earn some elemental types of grenades and explosives that spice things up a bit, but I’d also wager you won’t use them too often unless required by a certain boss or enemy type.
…combat feels most similar toRatchet And Clank, but with about 5% of the interesting weaponry and combat options to leverage against your targets.
There aremomentswhere the combat gets creative. In one instance, I blew up a plant that spread green goo on the ground, causing a herd of creatures to lose their footing as they ran towards me. They careened into an ice plant, which sent a shockwave through the entire party and froze them in place, allowing me to safely pick them off one by one.
Instances like this are cool, but are rarely actually planned out by the player and instead just kind of randomly occur as various enemy types interact with or get too close to assorted hazards on the planets.
The third-person, strafing, sci-fi laser gun combat feels most similar toRatchet And Clank, but with about 5% of the interesting weaponry and combat options to leverage against your targets.
The four or five boss fights are solid and creative enough, but the game offers unlimited health replenishing stations throughout each one, and also throughout much of the level design in general. This means the level of difficulty is almost always super low, with no real ways to make the game more of a challenge if you’re into that sort of thing.
From an exploration perspective, the game is much more rewarding. Scanning everything around you to gain useful knowledge a laMetroid Primeis cool, grinding on rails to reach new locations likeRatchet and Clankis rad, and gathering materials from rocks to craft new items similar toNo Man’s Skyis an enjoyable grind.
Unfortunately,Revenge Of The Savage Planetnever combines everything together to be as good as any of those other titles, but that’s okay. What’s here is still fun almost nonstop, if ultimately a little derivative and repetitive.
One thing unique to this game is a lasso you can use to capture alien creatures you come into contact with. After hitting a weak point and stunning an animal, you can tie it up and send it through a portal back to your base.
Back home, every creature is kept in an adorable petting zoo where you’re able to interact with them in cute and hilarious ways. You can also research each captured creature on your home computer, leading to gear unlocks, new costume colors, and other fun perks.
There is a collection of fun but easy environmental puzzles throughout each planet, and five challenge shrines in the endgame that very thankfully spice things up before the credits ultimately roll.Some of these were the genuine highlights of the gameplay, and I wished there were many more inclusions of them throughout the 10 or so hours.
Your habitat in the aptly named and swampy Nu Florida resembles a bit of a sci-fi trailer park, but is also home to some fun ways to customize the gameplay experience further.
With Alta currency collected throughout your journey, you can purchase a collection of furniture to fill up three separate rooms in your house with. None serve any actual purpose (outside of earning a few trophies), but most are interactable and lead to a fun, charming, and/or hilarious animation just to endear the game to you a little bit more.
Ultimately, the game kind of lets you tackle it however you please.
I thought the game was implying a base-building mechanic to me for a while, but that’s really not what it is at all. For me, that was welcome news since I’m not typically into that aspect of other games, but fans ofbase-building gameswill be bummed out by the slight misdirection.
Ultimately, the game kind of lets you tackle it however you please. If you want to mainline the quests and roll credits ASAP, you can do that. If you want to slack off and bum around the solar system, you can absolutely do that too. You are unemployed, after all.
Co-Op Capable, Solo Optimized
One final, brief thing to touch on here is the game’s ability to be played entirely in split-screen co-op. This is a returning feature fromJourney To The Savage Planet.
For me, co-op inReturn To The Savage Planetjust does not work well, and ultimately feels very shoe-horned in just for the sake of being able to say that it’s there.The game still plays 100% like the solo version, which absolutely feels more like the experience it’s actually tuned and balanced for.
Yeah, it’s neat to mess around and cause some chaos with your playing partner, but it also sucks that one person canveryeasily carry the other. If one of you is scanning every object and checking off every objective, there’s little incentive for your partner to do anything else.
It’s an unfair bar, but it’s clearly not a game designed from the ground up for co-op likeIt Takes TwoorSplit Fiction—the best games in the sub-genrethat put a premium on actual cooperation, communication, and preserving the gameplay experience for both parties.
Even from a UI perspective, there’s simply too much crammed onto both screens at times to even see what you’re doing. The objectives only show for the player on the left, and any menu you bring up for crafting at the 3D printer takes up the entire screen and stops your partner in their tracks.
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This mode feels like an afterthought, and really isn’t how you should choose to have the game reveal itself to you. This is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that I play video games with my camera controls inverted, and my partner does not.
The game made us select one or the other, which meant we couldn’t actually effectively play it together at all, since I couldn’t invert my controls without fundamentally breaking the game for my buddy. It’s an easy future patch, but shows how little this feature was actually considered.
Closing Comments:
I had a blast playing Revenge Of The Savage Planet. The varied planets are gorgeous, the goofy creatures are charming, and the absurdist Rick And Morty meets Tim And Eric humor lands more often than not. Exploring vibrant new worlds and cataloging all the flora and capturable fauna scratches an itch for any sci-fi fan that wishes they lived in a timeline where space exploration was possible. Unfortunately, while combat does bring some interesting things to the table with elemental synergies at play, the gunplay is pretty basic despite being a frequent and expected part of your expedition. It’s serviceable, but never truly exciting. Some fairly pervasive framerate issues and a co-op mode that feels more like an afterthought also don’t do the game any favors. Still, the game is definitely fun at the end of the day, and I’m going to stick around for the post-game content to continue cleaning up some quests after rolling credits. It doesn’t soar quite as high as I might’ve hoped, but it’s still a deep-space voyage worth embarking on.
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