Revenge of the Savage Planet is a refreshingly colorful and light-hearted co-op throwback to the carefree action platformers of the noughties

As I set about building my homestead on a strange new planet, my mission in Revenge of the Savage Planet turns out to be surrealer than I initially expected. Abandoned by my once benevolent corporate employer – and fired unceremoniously via video message – I find myself stranded on a sprawling grass-covered world, surrounded by bizarre, bulbous creatures. While materials and food supplies seem to be in abundance, on this peculiar planet I have also encountered…. Well, some, horrifying oddities. From a sentient skyscraper-sized tree tree that demands to be fed live worms to waddling furballs secreting flammable goo, my new home is going to take some adjustment…

That's Revenge of The Savage Planet through and through, the unlikely sequel to 2020's Journey To The Savage Planet. In an age of sour-faced soulslikes and all-consuming live service games, Revenge of the Savage Planet offers a refreshingly colorful and light-hearted throwback to the carefree action platformers of the noughties.

We have to go back

"You honestly never know the way the industry will change over time, so we don't like to chase those trends," says game designer, Steven Masters, "What we wanted to make was just a game that people can enjoy just existing in – somewhere that they can have fun." Part metroidvania, part Ratchet and Clank, your repopulation mission sees you exploring endearingly bizarre sandboxes as you attempt to mine them for materials, capture and study the local wildlife, and transform your crashed spaceship into a glorious new settlement.

While many developers try and fail to capture that childlike sense of fun, Revenge Of The Planet positively oozes with it. From the player avatar's comically stiff and exaggerated run animation, to the eyeballs of a racoon-esque creature rolling around on the floor after you kill it, each planet is a playground in the truest sense of the word. While its predecessor was played from a first person perspective, Revenge's move to an over the shoulder perspective allows for some enjoyably-daft player expression. As I deck my aspiring astronaut out in a legally distinct Han Solo-esque outfit and the silliest hat I can find, I watch as he slips in a pile of goo – legs flailing like a daddy long legs on ice skates.

Players can opt to hop and blast their way across Revenge of the Savage Planet's five planets alone if they so choose, but Masters recommends bringing a 'co-op meat clone' along for the ride. In game development, it's hard to predict what will be a hit, with genres that're hot at the start of production becoming passé by the time the game's finished. After a three and a half year development cycle, it's a terrifying reality that Racoon Logic knows all too well – yet thanks to the success of Split Fiction, Revenge's local co-op focus feels vindicated.

"It's really nice to see Hazelight just doing beautiful work and showing that it's possible to be good in that space again," reflects Masters on Split Fiction and It Takes Two's phenomenal success, "It was really validating for us when we saw those games it was just like, 'yes!' People still want [co-op experiences] – a co-op adventure is something that players are going to be fine with."

Yet where Split Fiction feels like unearthing a lost Xbox 360-era classic, Revenge of The Savage Planet channels the spirit of the PS2 glory days – or at least the rose tinted version that you remember. There's a playful cartoony spirit to this world's sci-fi violence. Anime-eyed mushroom creatures waddle over to you sweetly, before you learn that you must mine them for precious carbon. Yeeting a nearby racoon with a hefty kick, its terrified cartoony eyes bulge in terror, sending the furball hurtling into a tree with a comic book SPLAT.

Best served gooey

Influenced by everything from Jak and Daxter to Rick and Morty, Revenge Of The Savage Planet is unashamedly video game-y, gleefully embracing the joys and absurdity that the medium brings. Roaming around green grassland and leaping across gloriously blue water, the good natured co-op goofing around evokes the feeling of weekends spent devouring a two-player game in your childhood bedroom. In a nice touch, players can also deck out their spaceship base with whatever furnishings they see fit, using their gathered materials to kit out your ship, Animal Crossing: New Horizons style. Masters states that every item you place in your ship will have its own uniquely silly player interaction.

Yet the real joys of Revenge Of The Savage Planet are to be found when you go and play outside. As you attempt to rebuild your ship, create a settlement and make your way to the next planet, each sandbox boasts disparate game systems that collide together in a satisfyingly immersive sim fashion. Armed with a goo gun, players have a myriad of sticky projectiles to load it with, allowing them to coat enemies in lava, suspend them in a chewing-gum-esque gloop, or simply just douse them with water.

Each adorably goofy creature responds pleasingly uniquely to each substance. Whether it's a green gunk that changes the colour of your unimpressed-looking enemy's fur, or the pink sludge that sends them sliding across the gunk-soaked floor, even in my short demo, this leads to some playful experimentation. Can't reach the summit of that just out of reach cliff face? Create yourself a gunk-tastic goo-bridge! Surrounded by a horde of adorable charging critters? Douse them with flammable gunk and watch the poor fauna burn.

As you attempt to colonize each new planet, new FMV videos will play out on your ship's computer. These slick irony-drenched vignettes paint its actors in a hyper real, Fifth Element-esque hue, offering enjoyably unhinged insight into the megacorp that left you stranded in space – Alta Interglobal. It's an irony-drenched middle finger to the sort of megacorporate ownership rife in the industry at the moment – after all, the developer's previous company was unceremoniously shuttered alongside Google Stadia's platform. If the first game was sceptical of big business, Revenge of the Save Planet has simply had enough.

With the story moments only shown on your ship, it's up to players how much they choose to engage with the narrative - with your regular objectives playing out on the planets themselves. Alongside a cast of colourful and cartoony characters that attempt to make contact with you via your ship, this video screen also showcases a series of enjoyably unhinged live action commercials, skits that have more than a whiff of Rick and Morty's ad-libbed interdimensional cable.

It's an anarchic sense of humour that permeates throughout Revenge Of The Savage Planet. Even in my brief demo, my intergalactic adventure was brimming with fun little easter eggs that paid homage to various films and games. From the 'press X to pet respects' that shows up when I peruse my collection of captured critters in a Jurassic Park-esque zoo, to the Metroid Prime-esque scanner AI that scolds me for eating a plant before checking whether it was poisonous, here's hoping that each planet is as consistently full of knowing nods and playful jabs.

It turns out, co-op games are like buses – as just weeks after gamers were gifted Split Fiction, Revenge Of The Savage Planet will be along to serve up more multiplayer shenanigans. Masters confirms that the build I'm playing is almost complete, with Revenge Of The Savage Planet hitting all modern platforms on the 8th of May.

Could that include crash-landing on Nintendo's shiny new console? "We're going to see what the announcement is," Masters says, referring to Nintendo's April 2 direct. "It's highly likely that we'll end up at least trying something on there, but it probably won't be for a while."

Want to blast off to a new adventure with a buddy right away? Take a look at our best co-op games list for recommendations!