Revenge Of The Savage Planet (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £32.99 or included with Xbox Game Pass)
Verdict: Silly space
Space colonisation never looked so catastrophic — nor so colourful. At the start of Revenge Of The Savage Planet, your undauntable astronaut is quite literally dumped on a faraway world full of fluorescent plants and weirdo creatures.
Then he’s dumped, in a different sense, by the awful corporation who sent him there, and left to fend for himself. Can he get by?The answer is a resounding yes. This game is much like its predecessor, 2020’s Journey To The Savage Planet, in that it involves poking around, finding new resources and inventing new technology — ray guns and jetpacks and the like — so that you can move on to somewhere new.
And it’s also got the same (sometimes endearing, sometimes irritating) childish sense of humour. Everything here gurgles and sprays goo.
So how is Revenge different? The first thing that stands out is its new perspective: third-person, instead of first. I suspect this is because there’s more platforming here — more hopping from rock to rock — which is better done when you can see all your player-character.
Then there’s the greater emphasis on cooperative play with your friends, done over the internet or now — through a split-screen mode — while you’re sat on the same sofa. I mostly played Revenge solo, which was perfectly enjoyable, but there’s no denying that the co-op added a certain… deliciously malevolent… something. It’s fun to set traps for your buddies when you’re all meant to be getting along.
Revenge Of The Savage Planet (PlayStation, Xbox, PC, £32.99 or included with Xbox Game Pass)
Peter Hoskin gives the game a three star rating
But perhaps the biggest change is that Revenge is, er, bigger. Its planets are more open and expansive than before, and, yes, I did mean to say planets, plural. There are four of them now, not just one. Yet that might be Revenge’s undoing. For all its jumps, japes and jokes, there’s not quite enough going on to fill all that space.
I eventually tired of the same gameplay loop again and again: find stuff in the wild; return back to base to craft an upgrade; find stuff in the wild; return back to base… and so on. Sorry, Robinson Cosmo. I gotta go.