Typhoon Studios borrows liberally from other games to construct Savage Planet’s toolset. It adopts the scanning system of No Man’s Sky, with which you catalogue the planet’s diverse and occasionally aggressive wildlife. For its combat, Savage Planet graduated from the one-two punch school of Bioshock, combining a fast-firing pistol with various throwable objects such as acid grenades and exploding “bombegranates”.Īll of this works fine, and the colourful environments are enjoyable to explore despite the tired floating island concept. Hidden within the planet’s shattered strata are giant mushroom forests and crystalline caves, while its centre is dominated by a mysterious alien megastructure. One of Savage Planet’s more notable achievements is communicating a sense of scale and freedom in a game that is only a fraction of the size of most open-world contemporaries. It tickles the part of your brain that yearns for distant horizons without demanding a huge chunk of your life, unlike Skyrim or Breath of the Wild. The problem is there’s little to Savage Planet that’s new or hasn’t been done better elsewhere. In the absence of a specific mechanical hook, Savage Planet turns to comedy to grab the player’s attention, aiming for the satirical bite and splatter ratio of a Paul Verhoeven movie. Every alien animal you slaughter explodes into a quivering mass of vivid goo. When you return to your ship to upgrade equipment, obnoxious adverts for products like memory-erasing “brain wipes” yammer at you from a wall-mounted TV. Like the general structure, the comedy is intermittently successful, veering between amusing and irritating. The satire is toothless, doing little to differentiate itself from Fallout, The Outer Worlds and every other parody of capitalism that gaming seemingly loves despite being one of the most corporate industries around. The mock adverts will make you laugh, as will the capering of Kindred’s hyperactive CEO, but the objects of the game’s ridicule are too vague and distant for it to be more than window dressing. Strangely, for all the noise Savage Planet makes, its strongest moments are its quietest. There’s an element of silent theatre to the way your character communicates his goofy personality through his hands, while the world design is spotted with pleasing flourishes, such as trees bearing foliage that transforms into butterflies. In the end, it’s little touches like this, rather than the more in-your-face moments, that lend Savage Planet the dash of flavour it spends so much energy searching for.Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games. When we award a game the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the title is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. If you want to see the very best of the best for your platform(s) of choice, check out Polygon Essentials. I wander around the planet’s colorful surface, cataloguing the local flora and fauna and collecting resources by slapping and blasting aliens to death. Back on Earth, my boss watches my findings roll in, and modifies my mission accordingly. What starts as a quick survey mission quickly becomes a planet-spanning quest to bring him back a powerful artifact. I have the option to ignore him, of course. All I really need to do is refuel my ship and fly home.
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