Savage 2: A Tortured Soul

I’ve been a big fan of real-time strategy/action hybrids since Natural Selection, and have been following up on almost every game since then that steered in that direction. Unfortunately, I didn’t play too much of the Savage: Battle for Newerth; now that I’ve played its sequel, I can imagine why so many people raved about the original. Savage 2: A Tortured Soul strikes a perfect balance between real-time melee combat and strategy, truly bringing to life the term ‘strategic warfare’ in a way that the Battlefield series could never accomplish.

The reason I make this comparison is due to the uncanny similarity in the strategic values of Savage and Battlefield. Both games require you to gain control of nodes to control the map and win the game; and both have a commander watching over the game and commanding troops. Savage 2 stands out because it actually compels you (not against your will however!) to coordinate with your team, capture bases, earn resources, and do so much more with your team in order to achieve victory.

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Now before I confuse those of you that aren’t familiar with the game, let me lay down the basics. There are two sides in Savage 2 – the Legion of Man and the Beast Horde. To achieve victory, your objective is to destroy the other team’s command structure. To persevere through the skirmishes, each team requires resources so they can build and rebuild structures, spawn as special units, or buy items such as healing or mana potions. To ensure that the cash keeps flowing in, both teams have to fight for control of the various resource nodes scattered around the map, so that’s where all the action takes place.

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Where action is concerned, the game’s main focus is on melee combat. Savage 2 uses a sort of rock-paper-scissors system, where attacks can be blocked, blocks can be interrupted, and interrupts can be attacked. This lends new depth to melee combat, making you pay keen attention to what your enemy is doing. Unfortunately, it isn’t very easy to get a hang of, and more often than not you’ll get completely annihilated by an experienced player. The 200ms+ latency endemic to most Indian ISPs doesn’t help either.

It isn’t all bad though; after playing for a while you can get a hang of the combat, provided you’re patient and eager to own your enemies. If you’re not, you can always use your range attacks or play as one of the healer or siege units. Speaking of which, each side initially has access to only three types of unit: an assault unit, a scout/recon unit, and a builder. As and when your team builds additional structures, you gain access to more units.

In addition to this, each map in Savage 2 has a Hell Scar that one team can take control of at a time. When your team has control, your commander can build a Hell Shrine on it that allows you to spend the ‘souls’ you’ve collected to spawn as powerful units. You gain souls by delivering a killing blow on an enemy player. You can spend these to produce what the game calls Hellbourne units, the most powerful of which is called the Malphas. This creature has stupendous amounts of hitpoints and some really hardcore damage. When you spawn as a Malphas, the sky turns fiery red and starts raining ashes – it’s a really epic, empowering feeling to play as this unit!

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While the Malphas can tip the battle in your favor if supported well, true power lies in the hands of the commander. From his isometric view, he can construct different structures like your standard RTS. These include buildings that allow players to spawn as different units, as well as defensive structures like towers. Apart from this, he can issue orders to every squad in the team, to help guide them while he does all the strategic planning.

I know some of you may find the role a bit boring; so to spice things up there’s an awesome buff/debuff system the commander gains access to. He has a certain number of spells at his disposal that he can use to buff his units or deter enemy troops. These include resurrection spells, healing spells, bonus armor spell, minus armor spells, and many others. These can be cast anywhere on the map to help nudge the tides of battle. To ensure that they aren’t abused, the commander has a limited amount of mana (that regenerates over time, thankfully), and each spell has its individual cooldown.

At the end of the day, Savage 2 is a pretty stable, well-rounded melee combat game that transcends your everyday third/first person multiplayer shooter in a multitude of ways. That said, the lack of a decent persistent unlock system does reduce the life of the game, since you don’t have too much incentive to play that extra game. Although you can level up as you keep playing, doing so gives you access to nothing.

S2 Games has revealed plans of implementing an achievement system that lets you gain access to persistent items, but until I see it I can’t really tell how good it will be. As it stands, Savage 2: A Tortured Soul is definitely a good buy for anyone who has a decent Internet connection and craves a deeply strategic multiplayer gaming experience. You can play the game for free after downloading it from S2 Games, but for full functionality you’ll have to buy the game for about Rs 1200 on Steam.