PLATFORM: PC, PS4/5, XBOX ONE/SERIES (REVIEWED) | RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
In this sequel to 2020’s Journey To The Savage Planet, players assume the role of an outcast employee of an unsympathetic corporation which has its sights set on interplanetary colonisation. After crashing onto an unfamiliar planet during a routine mission, your employers decide that rescuing you would be far too much effort. Instead, you’re left to your own devices with little to do other than make yourself at home and try to make the place as habitable as possible.
Revenge follows much the same formula as its predecessor (albeit now from a third-person perspective instead of first), but expands on those foundations in pretty much every way. The game’s premise might make it sound like you’ll mostly be doing a lot of scavenging, crafting and generally just surviving on a gritty, barren and lifeless world, but there’s very little of that sort of thing going on at all. Instead, it’s a Metroidvania-esque action-adventure set on a cartoonishly bright and colourful planet that’s brimming with life.
When you’re first let loose on your new home planet, you’re armed with little more than a scanner that helps you learn about your surroundings, and a helpful yet sassy drone who follows you around. You also have access to a base which is equipped with a teleporter, a 3D printer, and a computer terminal, all of which prove to be extremely useful. The planet is completely open right from the start, providing a fairly large sandbox that you can explore at will and hunt around for useful items,although many areas will be inaccessible until you’ve acquired the right tools. Your drone will guide you towards whatever you need at any given time, seeking out bits of old machinery and other useful parts that you can then take them back to your base to upgrade your gear with little more than a couple of quick clicks, allowing you to progress further into the game.
There are of course plenty of obstacles and hazards that will hinder your attempt to create a new life for yourself. The local wildlife isn’t always friendly, often needing to be blasted into globs of brightly coloured goo by your trusty laser gun, although you can also capture most creatures and keep them as pets, researching them at your base to unlock extra upgrades. The planets themselves provide further difficulties, with deft platforming skills often being necessary to traverse the environment, particularly when the need arises for linking together multiple abilities to reach your destination safely.
Revenge really comes into its own after the midpoint of the game, by which time you’ve gained enough abilities to fully explore the worlds that you visit. When you’re able to visit the harder to reach parts of each planet, exploration becomes much more complex, rewarding your efforts with some nicely challenging situations. Amongst other things, you’ll be solving puzzles by using your gun to hoover up and then fire out different types of alien goo (each has a different effect so can be useful for a variety of situations), throwing grenades around the place, and using your whip to swing between grapple points and lasso onto grind rails, all while fighting off increasingly tricky enemies. There’s a fantastic sense of progression, and after what might feel like a fairly slow start while you’re building up your arsenal, your full range of abilities eventually prove incredibly fun to use. Backtracking to earlier areas, now accessible with the right tools in hand, feels like a joy rather than a chore, helped by some really witty (and thankfully not at all irritating) dialogue from your drone companion.
Respawning back at your home base after dying, instead of at the nearest teleporter on whatever planet you were exploring, seems a little bit unnecessary, but that’s really only a minor grumble in an otherwise delightful adventure. Good, clean, light-hearted fun!
