Revenge of the Savage Planetreminds me a whole lot of a certain Dark Knight’s return. Though Raccoon Logic’s colorful sequel is staking out very different tonal ground than any ofRocksteady’s games, I can’t help but compare it toBatman: Arkham City, another game that abandoned its predecessor’s Metroidvania structure in favor of a big open-world.
Revenge of the Savage Planet is a major departure from its predecessor, 2020’sJourney to the Savage Planet, just as City changed a lot fromAsylum. It maintains enough of the same aesthetic, tone, and (crucially) sound effects that fans will feel at home, but early on, it lets you know that things are going to be different this time around. The opening cinematic, which chronicles your intrepid space explorer’s crash-landing on a brave new world, plays out in the first-person view of the first game, but your character is shocked into third-person when they interact with the drone that will be their sidekick throughout the journey.
Gotham And A Galaxy
The field of view isn’t the only thing widening out, though, as the sequel also expands the focus from a single dangerous planet to four. This move is reminiscent of Rocksteady’s gradually increasing metropolitan land grabs, as it moved from a single plot of land with Batman: Arkham Asylum to a walled-in prison stretching across several Gotham blocks in Arkham City to, well, the whole city in Arkham Knight. Sequels rarely get smaller, but the Arkham games treated follow-ups like Pokemon evolutions.
What most makes Revenge of the Savage Planet feel like Arkham City is that the map’s expansion places it squarely in a whole new genre. Arkham Asylum tasked Batman with slowly, but surely, exploring the titular institution, unlocking new tools that unlocked new areas that, together, caused the Asylum to open up like the dark petals of a deadly flower Poison Ivy might grow after breaking out of her cell. Journey to the Savage Planet, similarly, gave you a small chunk of ARY-26, and set you loose to scan stuff as you gradually upgraded your arsenal of tools, gaining access to new areas of the dangerous world as you went.
Though not typical examples of the genre, Arkham Asylum and Journey to the Savage Planet were both thoughtful, exploration-focused takes on the Metroidvania formula.
Open Worlds Don’t Always Feel Big
Revenge and City, on the other hand, are both more straightforward open-world games. You still find new areas as you go but, especially in Revenge, it just doesn’tfeelthe same. Tools seem to unlock arbitrarily because, instead of finding them in the field, you find something to scan in the field, go back to your home base, craft a new tool, then return to where you left off. That stop-and-go pattern messes with the rhythm.
Plus, the game gives you so much guidance that I never felt like I actually hit a roadblock, either, I just felt like I followed a map marker until the UI told me to turn around so I could get the thing I needed to cause the map marker to fork over another map marker. The big difference between Revenge and City is that where Arkham adjusted well to this change, embracing the new opportunities it brought, Savage Planet feels a little lost.
City is my favorite of the Arkham games because the expansion allowed for a fundamentally different mood, as the dark, constrained asylum grounds gave way to a neon-lit art deco city and the freedom to soar above it. Revenge’s multiple planets don’t feel much different than its single planet — just bigger. I’d probably feel different about the Batman game too if it was Arkham Planets.
