I've rarely seen a game as obviously influenced by the circumstances that led to its creation as Revenge of the Savage Planet. Typhoon Studios, which developed the game's 2020 predecessor, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Journey to the Savage Planet, was acquired by Google to make games for its cloud-based platform, Stadia, then shuttered as Stadia slowly failed. Much of the team moved on to form Raccoon Logic and secured the Savage Planet IP in the process. Revenge of the Savage Planet — a game about a worker seeking vengeance against the corporation that sent them on a deep-space journey, only to wake up f꧅rom a lengthy cryosleep and find out they were fired — i💯s the not-so-subtle result of those years of turmoil.
Journey To A (Few) Vibrant Planet(s)
Though the game's pitch indicates the barely-veiled rage of a team that was screwed over by one of the biggest corporations on Earth, the gameplay I saw during a hands-off demo at the Raccoon Logic office in Montreal is joyous and vibrant. Journey to the Savage Planet already drew positive comparisons to the simpler, shorter, and more colorful games of the PS2-era, and Revenge doubles down, swapping out the original's first-person perspective for a third-person camera set far enough away from the character to make clear what fans already knew: these games are channeling Rare games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Banjo-Kazooie.
The switch to third-person is diegetic. When the cute yellow robot multitool thing which will be your sidekick throughout the g🔯ame crashlands in front of you at the start of the game, your character attempts to pick it up, but it shocks you… so hard the camera zooms out to third-person.
"It is a big collectathon a🐓t the end of the day,” says studio co-founder, Alex Hutchinson, who is returning as creative director. “By finishing the game, you’ve probably touꦑched 40 percent of the content."
When describing the vibe Raccoon Logic was going for with Revenge, Hutchinson says, “Bright, positive, optimistic, funny." Those characteristics are visible in the game in ways both big — the color palette is brimming with saturated colors — and small — the protagonist's "jaunty" walk is reminiscent of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:SpongeBob SquarePants, but with the extra oomph I associate with Disney and Fleishcer's 1920s rubber house animation. That walk being visible is a direct result of the perspective shift, as is the move from the first game's slap melee attack — which the team says just didn't look quite right in third-person — to a good old fashioned wind-up and kick.
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The world has expanded with your field of view. Journey took place on one dangerous world; Revenge expands to four, with a secret fifth you'll need to seek the game's true ending to find. Those planets offer a wide variety of biomes, from jungles and beaches to a world that is covered both in ice and lava. You've got more traversal methods than ever to use as you explore them, too: a double jump, a Breath of the Wild-style glider, a whip that doubles as a weapon and a grappling hook, and an underwater scooter you can use to speed through the deep. The goal is to re-collect the gear that was lost in the initial crash, and that quest will take you on a journey that spans all four planets, though you'll unlock them in linear fashion, doubling back to earlier locations for further explanation with the new tools you acquire as you go.
Making A New Home In Revenge Of The Savage Planet
Each planet has a space-y sounding name (Stellaris Prime, Zenithian Rift, Zephy, and Quarsaron-9), but your character will also build places more reminiscent of the terrestrial world they left behind 107 years ago. At one point in the demo, our plucky hero strides into an area where a big neon sign labels Nu Florida, and a population counter ticks from 0 to 1 to accommodate you, the solitary inhabitant. (Raccoon Logic is quick to point out that if you're playing in co-op, which the game supports in online and local splitscreen modes, with crossplay, the ticker will jump to 2). This will be your home base, and you can reshape it to fit your own Earthling sensibilities, as your space trailer is far more customizable than the previous game's static crashed ship.
This is all in keeping with Hutchinson saying that Revenge is “much, much, much bigger than the first game," but the scale still seems manageable for the fairly small team at Raccoon Logic. Leadership emphasized its commitment to avoiding overwork on this project. "Crunch doesn’t lead to good games," say🧜s co-founder, studio head, and executive producer Reid Schneider. "Crunch leads to burned out people who are walking zombies."
Schneider also emphasizes the creativity it's possible for a smaller team to channel. "Strong flavors above all. There’s no reason to start a company to make a bad Call of Duty," he says. The enemies in Revenge put that philosophy into practice. There are green Jell-O cubes that multiply each time you shoot them, so you'll need to use a water gun to wash them away. There are butt-faced monkeys (which Raccoon Logic says the ESRB would not allow to be included on the game's box art) that fire blood from their cheeks. And there are many varieties of little orb creatures that can resemble zebras, raccoons, unicorns, and more.
You'll have to kill some of these enemies. A pacifist run isn't quite possible despite the team working to deemphasize guns this time around, in pursuit of greater flexibility. Hutchinson says the game has "solid locks, varied keys," meaning solutions to problems will vary from player to player. So, if you opt not to dispatch a monster, you can capture it Pokemon-style, and it will be moved to pens back in Nu Florida. Hutchinson says the team wanted to balance out the amount of kicks these alie♎n creatures will suffer with some nice pats. "After all," as a fact sheet given to press says, "who is the real dangerous enemy, the corporate profiteers who fired you or a slimy exploding alien creature?"
That's a crucial question to keep in mind when those cute little enemies inevitably kill you. Each time you died in Journey to the Savage Planet, you respawned on your spaceship, emerging from the cramped quarters of your Bio-Replication Chamber. The ship's automated voice informed you that it had "made a clone of you that shares your memories," but reassured you that its bioprinting was 99.1 percent accurate, so hey, don't worry about it. Death may be an inconvenience, but after that brief traumatic incident, you're back to work and basically the same. Raccoon Logic pulled off something similar post-Google, retaining personnel and the Savage Planet IP after the closure of Typhoon. But just because it survived the death, that doesn't mean it didn't sting.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is launching in 2025.
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