Revenge of the Savage Planet is looking bigger, brighter, and savage-r | Hands-off preview

2020’s Journey to the Savage Planet always felt like a game that fell just shy of its potential. A sci-fi explore-em-up that wasn’t quite varied enough to be a Metroidvania or action-packed enough to be a shooter, it nevertheless mixed some pleasingly puerile humour with bright visuals and just enough depth to make it a surprise hit. In 2025 the sequel, Revenge of the Savage Planet, is going bigger, bolder, and brighter.

As I learned in a hands-off reveal with developer Raccoon Logic (formerly known as Typhoon Studios), Revenge of the Savage Planet is making significant changes to the established formula. For a start, it’s gone third-person, fully animating your brave explorer with some really quite adorable animations. And yes, somehow you can be a dog in a space suit again.

In the universe of Savage Planet, corporations are kingmakers and life is cheap – hence you being abandoned in a distant star system by your uncaring employers. But rather than wallow in self pity, you stride out into the unknown to gather resources and murder the wildlife. Part of your remit is to scan everything and collect samples of the fauna, which you do by knocking them into a dazed state and lassoing them with an energy whip before teleporting them into a special pen.

Described as a full third-person Metroidvania, Revenge of the Savage Planet will see you unlocking new abilities like a double-jump, glider, grappling hook, and the aforementioned whip to open up new paths through a total of five explorable worlds. You’ll frequent abandoned frontier camps to gather supplies and use their facilities, and can unlock a variety of cosmetic upgrades for your bases and your character. Although the furniture won’t have any intrinsic use, we’re assured that many items will have a humorous interaction.

Which is kind of indicative of this series as whole. While there’s plenty to see and do here, humour is at the centre of most of it. It’s deliberately charming, even though there was once a plan to make the sequel darker and more mature. It’s pretty clear from even the early gameplay I saw that, thankfully, Raccoon Logic have gone the other way. Travel to the next planet over, for example, is achieved by blasting yourself out of an orbital cannon in a ready-made drop-pod.

The shift to third-person has also allowed the devs to improve on the combat significantly, not just giving you a better blaster and more tools, but increasing the number of special attacks and effects you can utilise. For example, green slimes can’t just be shot or they’ll duplicate. Instead, you need to burn them, but burning them creates pools of steaming lava that can set fire to other enemies or you. So you can whip out your water gun to cool them down – a tool that can also be used to water certain plants and make them open up into platforms.

Taking the verticality of the first game and dialling it up, Revenge looks to be much wider and higher. It’s not fully open world, but is described as much “wider” then the first game, with more avenues and secrets hidden throughout the various worlds. It’s also fully playable in co-op, online and local, so you can team up with friends to brave the wilderness, and even overcome certain obstacles together.

Refreshingly, despite the existence of cosmetic items, everything is earnable in-game. There were will be a few extra costumes given away as rewards for buying different versions of the game, but crucially there’ll be no cash shop. You unlock new costumes and furniture items by cataloguing and researching flora, fauna, and resources, which you’ll also use to fabricate upgrades for you and your gear.

Although the build I saw was a little ropey, there’s around six months until the expected release of Revenge of the Savage Planet, which is loads of time for Raccoon Logic to improve on what they showed – and it already looks miles ahead of the first game, which itself was an enjoyable, if limited, adventure. Anyone looking for a charming, colourful Metroidvania with heaps of personality and humour would do well to keep an eye on the horizon next May.

Revenge of the Savage Planet is developed by Raccoon Logic, and is expected to release on all platforms in May 2025.