Has anyone played/seen this?

If I remember correctly, the first Savage came out about the same timeframe of NS, and for the most part the games are pretty similar, except each team has a comander and I do believe he has a bit more control over the individual units. Savage was basically NS only not sci-fi horror style, instead it was more of a fantasy style, with a bit prettier graphics and a little more gingerbread, but not nearly the depth of NS.

Anyone know anything about Savage 2?

Last I heard, Savage2 was going to be Savage but dumbed down and prettier. One of the features was that they wanted to “simplifyâ€

You know... I've downloaded this, and I just can't get myself to actually play it. I went through the tutorial and was all, "Wow, this sucks ass."

Anyone have a real review to convince me to actually start eating into my five hours?
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"Being a freedom fighter, a force for good, its a wonderful thing...you get to make your own hours, looks good on a resume, but the pay...sucks." - Bester
Thothie

Alright, I went ahead and downloaded it last weekend while it was on sale. Here's a semi-formal review..

As thoth mentioned, melee combat is a pretty simple paper/rock/sciccors kind of thing which consists of 3 moves. Attack, Block, and Interrupt. Attack<Block<interrupt. If you attack a blocking player you will take some damage and be stunned for a second or 2 allowing them to attack back, if you are interruped while blocking you will take damage and be thrown off balance. The combat seems simple but for some reason it can just be really fucking frusrating, especially in groups since if the person you are intending to hit is standing next to someone who is blocking, you will get stunned. Often it turns into 2 idiots circling each other with their guards up like their playing fisticuffs.

The class specific abilities are interesting and well implemented and do offer a good deal of variation to the game. While the 2 teams are similar and parallel each other in a number of ways, classes feel distinctively unique in a Warcraft 2 type of fashion. Beasts tend to have better offensive capabilities, while humans tend to be more versatile. There is some semblence of balance, but i sometimes question that as it seems classes with faster attacks have the advantage over slower more powerful classes.

You are awarded 3 collectables for killing enemies, these are gold, experience, and souls. Experience is a dumb mechanic in any class based game, and that's especially true for savage. Experience allows you to level your "character" as you play, however the levels really don't do much. They add more detailed graphic to your avatar and give you stat points to invest in. Stats basically increase one aspect of your character, be it hitting harder, having more mana/ammo, or having more HP. But since its a class based game and you can switch class at any time you often end up wasting you're better off just keeping all your stats equally distributed unless you plan to play one class the entire game. (stat points reset after every round)

Gold is used to buy items for your character and to purchase advanced character classes. Each team has 4 free classes: a builder (similar to a gorge or an engineer from TFC), a light meelee, a medium mele, and a healer class. The commander can also tech up to grant access to 3 advanced classes which cost gold from your gold pool. Of the advanced classes, there is a heavy melee class, and 2 seige units which excel at killing buildings but have limites defenses against infantry.

The third collectable, souls, are the bread and butter of this game. Everytime you make the killing blow on an opponent, you collect their soul. These souls can later be spent to purchase special Hellborn units (super units) from a hellgate/hellshrine. Hellgates are special buildings which are built on top of "hell scars" which are fissures that exist on strategic points on the map. Some maps have multiple hell scars, some only have 1 that you'll have to fight over. Which ever team owns the hell scar will have a significant advantage over the other team with the ability to build hellborn units.

Let me just say, hellborn units are amazing. There are 4 different hellborn units and all of them are equally impressive. The ultimate hellborn unit is a giant demon which requires 20 souls to purchase. When one of the teams acquires one of these units the whole sky turns black and fire starts to rain down and the music gets all intense and evil sounding. It's really pretty awesome, and probably the one aspect of this game that makes it really worth owning/playing.

Commanding in this game is much duller than in NS, and for a few reasons. First, the maps are quite simplistic leaving very little room for strategy. Strategies consist basically of telling your team to go to a gold mine and hoping they don't die as you watch helpessly from your ivory tower. Second, there is not much to tech up. Obviously commanding in NS you have several choices on which tech lines to take, andyour strategy can be built around what order you take them in. In savage... there are literally 3 upgrades. Your only other duty consists of setting up spawn portals around the map with towers to defend them. If you can figure out where you should drop a spawn portal in order to gain a strategical advantage over the other team, then congrats you're an expert at savage commanding.

The bottom line for those of you who have made it this far. At $19.99 if you're looking for a new game to pass the time for the next long awaited blockbuster, or if you're just looking for a change of pace from NS or TF2 savage 2 is certainly an option. It has its flaws but it's a fun passtime.