Savage 2: A Tortured Soul is a sci-fi fantasy video game developed and published by S2 Games. It is the sequel to Savage: The Battle For Newerth and it was released on January 16, 2008. S2 Games announced on December 9, 2008 that the game will officially be F2P (Free 2 Play) and that users can pay for a premium Account for some extra features. Looking for a new free game to play that offers both FPS and RTS at the same time with the added bonus of humans versus beasts, I set out to install the game and find it out for myself if it's worth it for casual gamers like me.

Requirements

• 2.2 GHz P4 / AMD 2000+
• 1 GB RAMM
• 128 MB fully DirectX 9.0 compliant GeForce or Radeon
• Linux, Windows 2000, XP, Vista
• Network/Internet Connection

Installation

Installation was fairly straight forward, you go to their website, sign-up for an account, follow the link for the client download, download the client and after installing it you go play with your account. Sure it's not as easy as Steam (which is by the way one of my favorites). But it's still easy if you're computer literate.

First Impressions

As soon as I saw this game, I was like...This game looks awesome based on the screenshots! Check it out! Players gain experiences when they play. I like that! Time for me to download and play.

You know what, it's actually true! Players really do gain experience points when they play but and that's a big 'but' a player's experience points resets each and everytime they join a server or a new round starts. That to me sucks big time. Since for me, everytime I see the abbreviation RPG it means experience points to me...experience points that stay with your character forever.

At least the graphics part wasn't a disappointment as you can see from my very own screenshots. The game looks awesome if you have the hardware to run it. And I really like the user interface, it's very DND'sh for me.

Singleplayer

There's really no single-player mode for this game other than the tutorial or if you just want to practice by yourself. And so I'm not going to talk about it that much.

Multiplayer

The game's main selling point was it's multi-player where players join official or non-official servers to go battle it out against one another. But you know what, it's only fun if you have a lot of servers to choose from or a lot of players to play with. I was really disappointed when I only saw around 1-3 servers with more than 5+ players playing in them. The rest are just empty or if they have players...are pinging above 200+. And to think that this game's F2P.

Players join as either Humans or Beasts and they try to destroy each others command center. If you think that this is just another conquer type of gameplay you're wrong as each team elects a player to be their commander. The commander views the game in a top-down view where he/she can build defenses and structures.

This makes it look like a strategy game except that the commander doesn't really have any control over it's units since the units themselves are controlled by the individual players that are on the same team. So it's like a 1st/3rd person view for the normal players and a top-down view for the commander.

There's different types of units for each team but they have pretty much the same functions e.g. healers, builders, melee, range, and siege units. Each unit has their own abilities but if you think about it it's not really as different as the opposing team. Since the game's F2P and a Premium combined all I can say is that as long as the game doesn't drag on for hours F2P players and Premium players have pretty much the same thing (as long as gold is plenty). But at the end-game most of the time Premium players/teams always have the upper hand since they can use Hellbourne units - extremely powerful units that can lay waste to entire armies before being killed or dying from degeneration. However, if you have a good commander and smart players that don't just run around then F2P players have a chance.

Final Thoughts

The game is awesome and it was a great experience overall...too bad it didn't last long, long enough for me to get more players to play the game with me. I've played it constantly but then you get tired of the game play because it's too repetitive and you don't get to keep stuff. The only thing that gets recorded is your account level which has no effect in-game as it only lets you join servers with a level requirement. That's it. Maybe I'm totally missing the point but if Savage 2 wants to get new players (of which I labeled myself) then replayability should be high.

Ratings

Installer - Nothing awesome and nothing terrible here.

Graphics - As long as you have the hardware to run it on it's maximum settings, this game looks awesome and on par with it's time of release.

Sound - The game's about Humans vs. Beasts and the music and sound effects actually make me feel like I'm actually playing a fantasy game.

Gameplay - This score started out as 5 and then it slowly went down to just 2 the more I play the game. It's just too repetitive for a casual gamer. How is this game going to convert F2P players to premium players? It's just not enough...