14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Revenge of the Savage Planet review: Gorgeously goofy game emerges from shadow of Google gorilla
One of the casualties of Stadia's closure was Typhoon Studios, a Canadian developer that made its mark with 2020's enjoyably wacky Metroidvania-style space adventure Journey to the Savage Planet. Google had bought Typhoon before the game's release but shut the studio down the same day a Stadia version of Savage Planet hit the shelves in 2021.
Fast-forward to 2025 and a sequel has just emerged from the ashes of the sorry saga, made by former Typhoon alumni who bought the IP rights for their company, Raccoon Logic. Savage Planet was never a mega-budget AAA title despite Google's deep pockets and this follow-up echoes that approach. It's a reasonably compact mid-priced romp laden with slapstick humour and cartoonish worlds, poking fun at consumerism and rapacious corporations. Wonder where the developers got that idea?
As in the original, your astronaut crash-lands on a far-flung world, leaving you to gather scattered pieces of his shattered ship in the hope of eventually escaping. Thus follows a Metroidvania loop of resource-gathering and equipment-recovering, all wrapped in a third-person platformer-shooter design.
The local wildlife isn't particularly hostile, albeit with some exceptions, and progress depends mostly on exploring small areas of a handful of planets, platforming around cliffs, forests and caves in low gravity slow-mo leaps. It's an agreeable gameplay loop well worn in its concept – farming the elements to make new gear, finding key equipment and then revisiting areas that are further opened up thanks to your new tools. It supports a full co-op mode, though solo play is equally fun.
Raccoon Logic ladles on the satire with some live-action video clips parodying the corporation that abandoned you on the savage planet. But the storyline functions as just a thin fig leaf for its anarchic gameplay, which puts acid, lava and electrically conductive goo at your disposal.
The modest size of the team at Raccoon Logic becomes apparent sometimes – the awkward physics and occasionally funky enemy behaviour can hamper the gameplay mechanics.
But this a goofy little treasure, a passion project for a small team bruised by their encounter with a corporate gorilla. They're still here and Stadia is long gone. Who's the monkey now?
