Revenge of the Savage Planet Is a Charming Bite-Sized Metroidvania

After beating Revenge of the Savage Planet’s story in a cool twelve hours, I felt satisfied. Like a comfort meal at a nice mid-tier restaurant — somewhere between a five-star Italian joint and an Olive Garden. A meal that doesn’t blow you away, but is just enough to leave you content.

Revenge of the Savage Planet, the sequel to 2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet, is a bite-sized Metroidvania that revels in freedom and exploration, despite its concise package. As a sequel, the game makes some smart improvements and has a joyous sense of humor — but can sometimes end up feeling like busywork. More than anything, though, it’s a refreshing reminder that open world games simply don’t have to be 100-hour epics, and in many cases, they shouldn’t be.

It’s impossible to talk about Revenge of the Savage Planet without bringing up the situation surrounding the game. The game’s developer, Raccoon Logic, is made up of developers from the studio that developed the first game, Typhoon Studios. After putting out Journey to the Savage Planet in 2020, the studio was bought by Google — and just months later, it and all the other gaming teams Google had built were shut down entirely.

Revenge of the Savage Planet opens with your character, a part of Kindred Aerospace’s Pioneer Program, crash-landing on an alien planet. But as you wake up, you’re fired from your job and told someone might come pick you up.....eventually. It’s abundantly clear that Revenge of the Savage Planet is a direct satirization of the studio’s experience with Google, and the sheer stupidity and cruelty that often takes place with corporatization.

There’s a biting sense of humor permeating the entire game, driven home through live-action video calls with your former bosses and ads for ridiculous products like Burger Squirts — a burger injected with juice that squirts out when you bite it. The overall narrative is admittedly simplistic, almost to a fault, but it’s held up by that remarkable sense of humor. And that’s ultimately a good thing, as story and exposition never get in the way of the core open world experience.

While I called Revenge of the Savage Planet a Metroidvania, the more apt comparison is actually Metroid Prime, which you don’t often see replicated. It’s a third-person shooter heavy on exploration, with a very deliberate loop that has you sequentially unlocking upgrades that let you explore further.

Of course, there’s a massive change this sequel makes from the first game, being in third-person instead of first-person — and honestly it’s a smart move. The third-person perspective works much better here for exploration, letting you get better views of where you want to head next. That’s especially true when you factor in how much exploration is based on abilities that require specific interactions with the environment, like grapple points or using a special spray to conduct electricity between points.

The core of what makes Revenge of the Savage Planet compelling is twofold: strong core mechanics and consistent upgrades. Movement simply feels good — it’s quick, responsive, and easy to navigate a world with a lot of verticality. There’s also a lot of variety simply baked into the core experience, whether it's capturing creatures to perform research, hunting down Orange Goo for health upgrades, or completing mini gameplay activities to unlock new abilities (like kicking three creatures into quicksand).

By and large that variety works well, but Revenge of the Savage Planet can still feel like you’re doing a checklist of busywork at times. While the stuff that drives the core story mixes things up in some interesting ways, if you’re hoping to get every item, you’ll be doing a lot of the same activities over and over. That’s an inherent problem that often arises with collectathon-style games, and I don’t feel like Revenge of the Savage Planet does enough, at times, to try and combat that.

That being said, the game does space out upgrades extremely well, at least when you’re completing those main objectives. There’s a real sense of progression built into every aspect of Revenge of the Savage Planet, as it practically feels like every hour you’re unlocking some new way to interact with the world. And despite the various planets you visit being fairly small and contained, they’re all packed with secret pathways and avenues to explore. This means those core 12 to 15 hours almost always feel fresh — even if some of the playtime after that can get monotonous. That’s made even more true by the fact that the game is entirely playable in couch co-op. As much fun as this colorful world is to explore, it’s doubly so with a friend.

Revenge of the Savage Planet’s biggest strength is that it always feels concise and pointed. Its humor carries a message while giving the game a vibrant, quirky aesthetic. And the open world is meticulously designed to feel bite-sized and not overwhelming.

It’s a game that doesn’t have the biggest bells and whistles, dozens of minigames, or copious amounts of side quests — but it doesn’t need to. Revenge of the Savage Planet wants to be the game you can sit on your couch and beat over a weekend with a friend, and that’s just perfect.

8/10

Revenge of the Savage Planet releases on May 8 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Inverse reviewed the PS5 version.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.