The savage planet seeks revenge! Will you succumb to the alien wastelands or succeed in toppling the company that laid you off while you were in cryosleep for a hundred years?
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a humorous sci-fi third-person shooter where players explore a wide variety of alien planets, all with unique dangers and weird creatures.
In the new game, players get to live out their dreams of being exploited by a nonsensical future corporation that got bought out by another nonsensical future corporation. Does this sequel manage to keep the ball rolling? Find out in our full review for Revenge of the Savage Planet.
Revenge of the Savage Planet
Developer: Raccoon Logic Studios
Publisher: Raccoon Logic Studios
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (Reviewed)
Release Date: May 8, 2025
Players: 1-2
Price: $37.99
Revenge of the Savage Planet sets the player up with some weird expectations at first. It’s very easy to think that the game would be a survival crafting experience where players build their own base and move through resource trees thanks to its presentation and introduction.
The game starts with us landing on a planet with all of our gear missing while having to break down resource nodes to create our items, which is pretty textbook survival craft stuff. In reality, Revenge of the Savage Planet is more of a mission-based puzzle adventure where progress is gated behind acquiring upgrades through somewhat linear map exploration.
Once you make your peace with that fact and understand that the game is closer to a collect-a-thon than something like Satisfactory, it becomes much more enjoyable to play, but it’s undeniable that it makes for a weird shift in first impressions.
When it comes to exploration, Revenge of the Savage Planet gives players a lot to do. There are tons of collectibles, puzzles, and side activities that can be performed on your way to a main mission. It’s quite relaxing to just walk around observing the weird alien life that can be encountered on each planet, slowly acquiring more resources or filling up your Kindex with new entries.
The game’s side objectives, like scanning new animals and plants, as well as capturing enemies to research them, are constantly relevant and create an active playstyle for completionists. There’s always something to look out for, which turns exploration into a much more engaging activity.
One incredible quality-of-life feature is that, depending on what upgrades the player currently has, the items on the map will be marked as either available or unavailable when hovered over. This is a game-changer that saves the player from backtracking only to be met with a puzzle they can’t complete yet, avoiding frustrating moments.
Most of the game’s plot is delivered through FMV cutscenes with real actors, who do a great job at providing different flavors of dystopian weirdness. The game is filled to the brim with satirical portrayals of corporate greed, but the cartoonish manner in which everything is presented makes it land in a comedic, rather than bitter way.
The big display inside of the player’s base is used to play new video messages that move the story forward, as well as advertisements for either useless products or outright scams, which feel very inspired by Adult Swim’s infomercials and Tim and Eric’s sketches.
Some of these advertisements end up coming into play later on, with the Shama Lama Ding Dong guru (it’s a whole thing) having his own set of missions where we have to become influencers by posing in different locations, although not all ads have story relevance, as some are just one-off jokes.
Revenge of the Savage Planet‘s combat is simple for the most part, but it does have some systems to keep the player engaged, like the enemy weak point system, which incentivizes accuracy and is even required at points during boss fights and for specific enemy captures.
Certain enemies can get stunned when doused with water, while others have specific parts of their body that need to be targeted to defeat them, ranging from hard shells that are broken with melee whip attacks to magma armor that needs to be destroyed with a ground pound.
The laser pistol is the default weapon for most of the game, which can be slowly upgraded through a tech tree, but the player can also harvest elemental liquids from plants, which have unique uses in combat, like splashing enemies with lava or creating large electrified areas with conductive goo.
Combat encounters are always chaotic thanks to the environmental hazards and different situations that the player is put in, but most enemies behave similarly to each other, meaning they all mostly get killed the same way, except for different weak spots here and there.
Weapon variety is also lacking, since the player’s arsenal is somewhat limited, centering around the pistol and goo blaster for a good chunk of the game, while the other gadgets mostly serve as puzzle-solving tools that don’t come into play as much during combat.
A lot of the missions also revolve around going to a place, not having the item required to progress, and then being sent somewhere else to grab it. There’s a lot of length added to the story missions this way, with the game sometimes explicitly sending you to a place, only to tell you to turn around and go somewhere else as soon as you arrive.
Revenge of the Savage Planet lets players explore unique alien worlds while solving puzzles and fighting weird creatures, all while involved in a plot to take down the megacorp Alta Interglobal. What you see for the first few hours is mostly what you get: an open-world-ish Metroidvania with a good sense of humor.
The sequel is generally more cartoonish than its predecessor, Journey to the Savage Planet, featuring more colorful environments and exaggerating some enemy designs, as well as giving the player’s animations in third person quite a bit of personality, something that shines through without disrupting gameplay.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is overall fun, but tends to be a bit bland and repetitive in some areas. If you enjoyed the previous game, then you will most likely also enjoy this one, as long as you go in with the right expectations.
Revenge of the Savage Planet was reviewed on Microsoft Windows using a game code provided by Raccoon Logic. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Revenge of the Savage Planet is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).
