Journey to the Savage Planet review: Wonderfully wacky

Good things come in small packages. It’s an old saying, but a good one. Journey to the Savage Planet, the first game by a small team of developers at Typhoon Studios, is a small and thoroughly delightful experience. The quirky alien world is home to gorgeous environments, fluid traversal mechanics, tantalizing exploration opportunities, and simple yet pleasing combat.

Lost in space

The premise of Journey to the Savage Planet is a simple one. You’re an explorer that has been sent to a distant planet to scan the environment and catalogue the local flora and fauna. The end goal is to find the planet habitable for humans. The only problem is that you’re part of the Kindred Aerospace suite of explorers, the “fourth best” company when it comes to space travel.

Your ship doesn’t as much as land on this strange planet as it does crash and burn. Obviously, you can’t very well return to Earth a hero for finding a habitable planet with a broken ship, so your objective expands. Now you’re on the clock for documenting the wildlife and finding fuel so you can get back home.

This task is made easier with the help of EKO, the friendly – and sassy – AI companion. She’ll helpfully point out nearby points of interest, inform you about the wildlife, and offer up new side quests for valuable upgrades.

Brave new world

Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t just a straight shoot from start to finish. There are side quests, plenty of exploring, and hundreds of collectibles along the way to keep you distracted. All of this is stitched together in a Metroidvania-like manner.

As you progress, you’ll encounter obstacles that cannot be overcome without an upgrade. Cue a detour down into a cave system to find the precious material needed to craft a gauntlet upgrade that lets you carry around exploding plants.

With your nature-made bombs in hand, you can now press onwards in your journey to uncover the planet’s mystery. Alternatively, you can backtrack to those fractured walls you spotted in the previous area and see what’s hiding behind them.

Thankfully, backtracking is made an absolute joy thanks to Savage Planet’s slick traversal systems. Early on in the game, you’ll unlock a double-jump, followed by a grappling hook device. With these two abilities unlocked, the whole game opens up as you jump and swing around areas, always on the hunt for hidden routes leading to secrets.

The exploration is further aided with the teleportation system. Each major area has a teleporter, which can be used to fast travel to other teleporters or directly back to the ship.

But nothing can quite beat stringing together quadruple jumps and grappling hook swings as you search high and low for Orange Goo to upgrade your health and stamina or alien alloy for another tool upgrade.

The traversal mechanics don't mean much if the world isn't beautiful, and Savage Planet is just that, beautiful. The team at Typhoon Studios have done a tremendous job at crafting a world that feels truly unique. It's a visual feast that you can't help but enjoy. It’s thrilling to stand on top of a cliff, surveying the gorgeously crazy land around you, as you work out whether or not the waterfall on a distant floating island holds a secret – and they almost always do.

The Art of Space War

Even though the traversal mechanics steal the show, the combat deserves some spotlight.

For a game with a lot of hostile wildlife, there’s not a great deal of focus on the shooting. To this end, you only get one weapon, a laser pistol that can be upgraded to hold more ammo, recharge faster, and fire off a bouncing shot.

You don’t really ever feel the need for a fast-firing weapon or a long-range sniper as the combat is often in little pockets of fun. Enemies are more so there to provide disruption to the flow, forcing you to quickly re-think your positioning rather than insurmountable forces you must overcome.

While you do only have a laser pistol for ranged combat, your adventurer comes equipped with a mean backhand and kick attack for when things get too close. I’ll never get tired of booting a Pufferbird into the air like a football and trying to shoot it, watching it explode like a goopy clay pigeon.

But where the combat really shines is in how you use the handful of unique tools. Aside from the aforementioned bombs, you’ll also get sticky goop that traps aliens, gelatinous goo that bounces you into the air, as well as shock bulbs that electrocute and stun alien lifeforms.

The focus is more on your positioning and how you use these than it is your shooting proficiency. For example, you’re told early on that the best way to defeat a certain speedy alien is to dodge sideways. Though this does work, you could also use the sticky goo to keep it still while you circle around to shoot its weakpoint.

But the combat feels the best when you’re able to string these tools together with the slick traversal mechanics. There’s nothing quite like double-jumping between platforms, throwing out some bait, grappling up higher, and chucking a bomb to clean up the stragglers.

However, it would still be nice to have some more firing modes for the pistol. The charge shot is an interesting addition, albeit not as useful when most enemies die after a couple of rounds.

To the moon and back

While you could do this all on your lonesome, Journey to the Savage Planet is best experienced with a friend, or a “meat buddy” as its lovingly called in-game. This friend will accompany you as you explore the world, receive all the upgrades you unlock, and aid you in combat against the hostile aliens.

It feels like going on an adventure with someone, exploring the last frontier of humanity. You won’t be alone as you scale the inside of a mountain to reach a secret and you’ll have another gun in the fight against any challenging alien threat.

There’s just something nice and relaxing about exploring the world of Savage Planet with a friend. I just wish you could emote or wave at one another.

And all of this co-op adventuring is set to the backdrop of a pumping tune that fits right at home in the genre. There’s a real twang to it, a rhythm that begs you to push past the next corner and see what wonders await.

Houston, we have a problem

Unfortunately, Journey to the Savage Planet isn’t without its faults. During my time playing co-op, I experienced a crash every 45 minutes to an hour. The game would freeze, becoming entirely unresponsive, and require a hard shutdown via Task Manager.

This was inconvenient and really hampered my ability to fully immerse myself in the experience. In saying this, I still actively want to get in and play. The charm of Savage Planet persisted despite the fact I was constantly interrupted by crashes.

Then there are the more subjective problems. The humor, while at times will make you laugh, didn’t always land. Whenever you return to your ship you’ll be greeted with an advertisement selling some product – like a sea monkey terrarium where the monkeys are actually humans and the terrarium is a shopping mall with a Black Friday panic button.

While a few of these will garner a chuckle, there are others that fall short. Experience enough of these in a row and it winds up getting tiresome. Repeated use of satire in such overt ways eventually feels less like a finessed commentary and more like slapstick.

The lack of a map is also a bit problematic at times. Early on, it can be overwhelming to try and work out where you’re going and where you’ve been. It’s also troublesome when backtracking to find previously-spotted secret areas that were just out of reach a few hours ago.

For those gamers that prefer to sit back with a controller, being able to remap buttons for personal preference (or accessibility) is an expectation. Despite offering mapping for keyboard and mouse, Savage Planet fails to provide such options for controller users.

To infinity and beyond

In saying all this, Journey to the Savage Planet is playing in a genre full of titans, and it’s holding its own. The quirky environments and slick traversal systems make it a pleasure to explore. While the humor doesn’t always land, it still has a charm to it. If you can find someone to go on an adventure with you, there’s a lot of entertainment to be found in this bubbly and zany little package.

Sam Chandler

Guides Editor

Hailing from the land down under, Sam Chandler brings a bit of the southern hemisphere flair to his work. After bouncing round a few universities, securing a bachelor degree, and entering the video game industry, he's found his new family here at Shacknews as a Guides Editor. There's nothing he loves more than crafting a guide that will help someone. If you need help with a guide, or notice something not quite right, you can message him on X: @SamuelChandler