Revenge of the Savage Planet review: An upbeat solar system that's fun but frustrating

In a world where countless generic survival crafting games get annoyingly popular every week, it’s nice to even just catch a glimpse of one that has any degree of visual flair, and thankfully, Revenge of the Savage Planet is dripping in it.

The visual style does a lot to carry my enjoyment. In a world where so many survival/crafting games go for gritty realism, it’s a breath of fresh air to have one with colorful environments and weird fauna and flora to uncover; the fauna in particular managing to strike a weird balance of disarmingly cute and somewhat disturbing. It immediately made me much more motivated to get out and explore the world to see what oddities I could find. 

Unfortunately, that motivation didn’t last as long as I’d hoped, as it quickly became clear that all of the game's planets only had a handful of tricks up their sleeve. That fresh “new world” feeling faded very quickly each time I settled on a new planet, and it left me just wanting to push through the main quest rather than explore all the side challenges and research tasks the game threw my way.

The game has five planets for you to explore, with the main quest taking you through each one in a fairly linear fashion after your ship was smashed to bits upon arrival, scattering your gear across the solar system. The main quest follows a simple formula of dropping you on a planet, giving you clear objectives to retrieve or rebuild parts of your lost gear, completing platforming challenges and combat encounters along the way, before unlocking the ability to (quite literally) fire yourself at the next planet like a missile and start again. You are free to go off and explore the planets you’ve unlocked whenever you like to complete all of the aforementioned side content, but I found myself losing interest in doing so quite quickly.

The upside is that if you do decide to play the game in a main-quest-only fashion, there’s very little stopping you from doing so. It’s nice and clear what your objective is at all times, and it’s quite rare you’ll need to make massive detours to upgrade your gear. Exploring the areas along the critical path gave me the vast majority of the resources I need to craft mandatory upgrades, and I never felt like the game was punishing me for ignoring side content, which I appreciate, as other survival crafting games can be a real slog in that arena.

What also helps is that Revenge of the Savage Planet goes a lot lighter on both the survival and crafting aspects of the game, helping it keep up the brisk pace I enjoy. You won’t have to worry about any hunger, thirst, or sleep meters, just a limited health and stamina pool that will keep you on your toes and doesn’t allow for many mistakes. While on the crafting side, the futuristic setting means you just have to worry about gathering three base elements which you use to create every item in the game; all you need to do is find the blueprint.

However, this simplicity does sometimes get in its way, most notably with combat. Most combat will see you dodging monsters lunging at you while you fire back using your pistol, and that’s pretty much all there is to it, which doesn’t make for many exciting encounters. The game’s bosses are fun spectacles, but most don’t pose any kind of challenge, and while finding an enemy’s weak point to stun them (so you can capture them for research) does add an extra little dimension, you only need to do that once for each species you encounter.

Then there are the design choices that are just outright annoying. The first one that springs to mind is the segment where you must jump between a long series of small floating platforms in the sky, only to be repeatedly ambushed by exploding enemies that send you flying to your doom if you don’t react in time. Pulling that trick once or twice is a fun little prank on the player, but it happened so many times that I had to put the game down for a while to let the frustration subside. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it does highlight a lack of sophistication in the level design.

Despite all of these complaints, I should emphasize that I did enjoy myself. The game’s many FMV cutscenes are full of well-written comedy, and that tone carries into the gameplay. Frustrated though I was at the exploding enemies, I do see the funny slapstick side of it — something that will no doubt be enhanced if you play with a co-op partner.

While the exploration didn’t give me the sustained sense of joy and wonder I was hoping for, Revenge of the Savage Planet keeps things light and brisk, making it an enjoyable survival crafting adventure you can charge through with a friend. It may not do anything revolutionary in the genre, but I certainly wouldn’t mind if similar games took some lessons from it on how to tighten up this kind of experience.