Revenge of the Savage Planet took me around 14 hours to burn through, and the time was well spent on four different planets. On some planets, I fell from a mountain by projecting a bad jump, to getting knocked off a small ice platform because a tiny alien exploded with a horrifying scream. Revenge of the Savage Planet delivers engaging gameplay with hours of fun on quirky planets, but with lackluster storytelling.
Run, Jump, Scan, And Capture
Throughout the 14-hour journey into the game world, you will jump through four different planets. There is a sense of anticipation of the next planet visit, as the game did an amazing job of carving each planet with its own identity. All four planets in the galaxy appear different with biomes that are original to their own, which makes exploring feel fresh and different. In addition, each planet offers new game mechanics to unlock past challenges or puzzles that couldn’t be completed.
One of the ways you interact with the world is by scanning it, which allows you to read quirky written lines about almost everything in the game, from trees to small stones on the ground, and will be instantly familiar to fans of the Borderlands game or the Marvel movies.
The scanning feature does help you figure out new plants or parts of the puzzles, it works as a pokedex in Pokémon games. The entire transition here feels natural, as you are out exploring, you will come across new blockades for your collectibles. Here you can scan it to know how to break the blockade to get the collectible. It adds an immersion layer to the game, especially if you play these games only for collectible hunting.
Besides the scenic beauty of the planet, the wildlife is vibrant as well, animals that you can kill or capture for research. You are going to be doing a lot of animal capturing. It’s a shame, we can’t do that to bosses, or that would’ve been too much fun. You can capture small-scale to large-scale animals, as long as you stun them before capturing. Shooting them constantly will eventually kill them, and they will become part of the flora and fauna of the world.
Ain’t no Mountain High Enough
The gameplay is the strongest suit of any game, and fortunately, Revenge of the Savage Planet brings it to near perfection. Almost everything flows well, since it is a game about resource hunting, it can get boring and tedious without innovation. Here, the game shines by introducing new mechanics, tools, and upgrades to make your resource hunting easier.
While most common resources can be found by shooting at a rock with a pistol, the rarer ones are trapped inside a box that can only be opened by solving a puzzle, fending off enemies, or getting to the challenging location. The third one might seem easy, but you will find the boxes on top of them tucked away in the underwater section.
The freedom of exploring almost anywhere in the world, stumbling upon a collectible trapped in a puzzle, is a quintessential feeling we all crave in an open-world game. Once you unlock and upgrade the grappling hook to latch on to almost anything, the exploration reaches its peak. Suddenly, I found myself jumping over a mountain via the grappling gun to find some resources, which is a contrast to the initial phase of the game, where I had to press the Jump button twice to jump over a 5-foot rock.
The puzzles were decent, nothing to write home about, but it is the variety of the puzzles that got my interest. The pattern of the puzzles reminded me of my first time solving riddles in Batman: Arkham City or Asylum. The puzzles always reward you with resources, beneficial to your overall character upgrade. So, you are not just mindlessly collecting stuff; every time you solve a puzzle to grab the resource as a reward, your tools are getting more powerful.
The gameplay incentive puzzles hidden behind small puzzles that require you to equip a specific tool or item are what make each rare resource gathering or collectible hunting different. The game’s biome also made the same puzzles feel different, as you will find the same puzzle mechanics underwater or in a desert. It never felt as if I was doing the same old puzzle; the environment, the introduction of the new tools, and the constant reward made every resource hunt the best part of the gameplay.
Bland Enemy Design for Quirky World
While the bosses were unique, unfortunately, the same can’t be said about most of the enemies in the game. The goofy-looking enemies did wear out their welcome. They all had a strange appearance, at times, it felt as if they were a Mod variation of simple enemies you see on a modding website. None of them felt real or part of the world, as they seemed to feel separate. A small furry creature with googly eyes has become a tiresome trope constantly seen in many Unity/ Unreal Engine games.
Luckily, later in the game, the appearance of enemies got better, each with a unique appearance and deadly attacks. But that came after 5 hours of gameplay, most of the basic enemies still had that uncanny look to them. The bosses, on the other hand, all had good animation and designs, and every boss fight felt amazing. While the boss did feel good, most of them are too easy; the only challenging boss in the game is the final boss, part of the secret mission.
I managed to clear off most of the bosses in the game far too quickly, which was ludicrous, as enemies outside the boss room gave me a tougher time than the boss; they were guarding. The secret boss left a good taste, as it was excellently designed, and it did a great job in encouraging me to use all my tools at my disposal to get a win.
Skipping the Narrative
The storytelling of this game is a mixture of Borderlands, Rick and Morty, and most of the clichéd Marvel dialogues you have seen in your life. Since you are playing a silent protagonist, the voice acting is through a trusty robot companion. The narrative of the game was never my concern, while sometimes it does work as intended, but most times, it fails to bring anything new to the table.
If you are familiar with the movie or recent video game tropes, you will have a fun time pointing them out again, like Leonardo DiCaprio in the scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. At one time in the game, the narrator did say, “It is Quiet.. Too Quiet.”
The only thing that brought any sort of uniqueness or charm to the game was the final boss of the game. Without revealing too much, the visual aesthetic of the final boss felt unique as it never used the game’s quirky humor or appearance.
The moment the boss was introduced, it stood out to me, as it was presented in a bit of a serious manner. It appeared innocent while delivering a slightly threatening message. The whole dynamic of the final boss and your character carries the same strange relationship Batman shared with the Riddler.
Other than the final boss, the rest of the game’s characters fall flat. The game always puts the story on the side, as you are allowed to skip most of the video and audio storytelling to get straight into the gameplay.
Stopping the Voices
While at first, the narration felt important, after scanning every item or upgrading a new 3D design, the voices get progressively more annoying than before. The objective that can be summarized in a few words, the game added a voice narration to it, even some of the puzzles also had a narration.
They are, by far, the most annoying sections in the game. And it took me around 30 minutes to find the entire chatting narration to be incredibly annoying, so I had no choice but to head to the Game’s Option menu to lower the Dialog audio bar, but luckily, the game features an exclusive Less Chatter Option to lower the chatter count. While the game will not tell you about this feature, it does exist, and it is a lifesaver during exploration. You can set the Chatter option to Minimal, Maximum (Default), or None.
I would recommend setting it to Minimal; None will be favorable, but it will get a bit lonelier. The game does offer music, but they are hardly noticeable, so the chatting narration can fill out the empty spaces during gameplay. Setting up to None is the best option, as you must defeat the bosses or solve puzzles by paying attention to others instead of voices telling you the solution after a mere 10 seconds into the puzzle room.
Redundant Mechanics
The game offers base-building mechanics, but for no one. You are basically building a small colony for nobody. I didn’t pay attention to this section of the game; every time I head back to the base, it was always for getting an upgrade for my tool. After getting it, I just left to explore without worrying about the state of my base. I couldn’t care if there was an earthquake that destroyed the entire colony, as long as the upgrade system (3D Printer) worked, I was fine.
You can also customize your base with furniture, art, a kitchen, and other stuff. But again, it leads to the same hollow point, since you are not getting any people to settle in your colony, the entire customization part of the game feels stupid and pointless. You are given an empty base at start in your hub area, and at the end of the game, I looked at the same empty room, thinking about keeping the specialized currency or wasting it on getting stuff into the empty rooms.
The game features specialized currency only for the base-building mechanics; you get millions of this “money” to buy stuff for your room.
Since I’m the lone survivor on the planet, I decided to keep the currency and let it rot in my wallet, rather than getting furniture for a room that no one lives in. The entire base-building mechanics feels redundant from the start, while throughout the story, your base expands with new buildings, including farm animals, the social hub area gets predominantly more lonely. Each new building takes up a space that was used by trees and plants
As you see, no one in your hub area, the game indirectly switches from a friendly vibe to a post-apocalyptic ghost town very quickly. The base-building mechanics would’ve worked if each planet had a special NPC that you had to rescue, and now they take part in your hub area or base. Unfortunately, the game just throws out these mechanics as a checkmark on a paper instead of any value to the world or storytelling.
Final Summary
What Worked:
- Co-Op and Splitscreen Feature.
- Reward for Exploration.
- Go anywhere, jump over a mountain, and a sense of freedom.
- Upgrades that help exploration.
- Engaging Gameplay.
- Unique World, Strange Creatures.
What Didn’t
- Storytelling & Dialogues.
- Easy boss encounters.
- Unnecessary base-building mechanics.
The gameplay is engaging and hooked me to the seat for hours on end. Storytelling didn’t strike anything new, and the Skip button made me immediately jump into the gameplay section without watching a mandatory cutscene. The core concept of looting, shooting, and stealing is done to perfection. The light puzzles, different enemies, and environment challenges made the gameplay more engaging. While the game fumbles on the storytelling and dialogue delivery elements, the gear that moves the gameplay are working at all times.
Final Score: 8/10
Reviewed on: PC
The review code for Revenge of the Savage Planet was provided by the publisher.
