Savage II

The basic premise for Savage II is building onto that of the original. Build, hunt, research, engage, siege, and win. Sounds pretty simple, hmm? Imagine an RTS where your units are real players. Now imagine trying to get them to listen. Enter Savage II.

Hybrid games have never really done that well on today’s market, mainly for one reason. When you have a hybrid, you have to focus on two, sometimes very different, game genres. Getting these to play together nicely often doesn’t come together well, and many desired features are left out of games.

However, Savage II promises to bring together what is effectively the real-time strategy genre along with a role-playing first person shooter mode. That’s quite the mouthful, eh? Wondering how it works?

The Strategy Bit

The strategy in Savage II comes in the forum of base building. The commander of your team gets the classic top down view of the game world, building buildings, researching technologies, and sending the builders to work quickly. Once he’s accomplished this, he sends player controlled scouts to find the enemy, then the full scale combat can begin. Without an effective commander, the players within the world are nothing. Left: A view of the current commander interface, the units on the left are player units waiting to be commanded.

The FPS Role

Savage II is not geared toward people who want immediate action. Especially considering you must wait for your commander to build, research, and amass enough gold to fund the technologies you’ll need to run an effective base, you’ll need to stay around and protect it in its first few moments of its life. It’s also not meant for those who can’t follow instructions, as the commander is the central view-point to the game, he gives orders of where he wants his units to go. Think of it as a Battlefield Squadron leader.

The Game World

The commander and his player units find themselves in the world of Newerth, where humans and beasts constantly battle for supremacy. Each side has a nice bit of lore behind it, as well as customized units which are not available to the other side. There are pure melee units, hybrid units, healers, siege units, and builders. Each one has a unique role in the gameplay of Savage II and none of them share any of their abilities. Players can choose to either belong to the Legion of Man, or the Beast Horde. Once a player has chosen his allegiance, he cannot go back.

Each unit within the world gains experience points, similar to a role-playing game, for helping set up a base, defending the base, scouting the enemy, finding or seizing enemy resources, healing allies and killing the enemy. This experience converts to levels, and with each level, players can increase their character’s abilities in small ways. Health, armor, damage and mana can all be increased upon leveling, making the player’s character that much more powerful. Leveling also allows characters access to new equipment and abilities.

Technical Aspects

Savage II is slated to be a much better game, graphically, than that of Savage. The interface is much more improved, though players will find some common aspects between the two, such as the health gauges. The true technical aspects of the game haven’t been released yet, but I would imagine if your computer can run a larger scale MMORPG like World of Warcraft, you should be able to run Savage II just fine.