Savage Resurrection

Unlisted, dead game, sad.

I bought this game awile back, and not it's free to play and no one plays it.
The game feels like it was not finished and the creator just left it to die.
So I don't recomand this game due to the lack of players and the lack of improvement as the ceators abandon the game.

Savage 2 is probably the best multiplayer game I have ever played, but S2 Games and this game are a terrible abomination. Savage 1 was alaso a great game in its own right, although I preferred Savage 2. I know this game was meant to be a remake of Savage 1, essentially, but it just isn't very good, and S2 released a completely unfinished game and tried to make as much money as possible off of it seemingly while knowing it was going to die like all of their other games and doing nothing to fix it. They really are a quite awful developer that just happened to make one (or two for you Savage 1 fans) of the best games of all times. But, this just isn't it. They should have brought in at least something from Savage 2 or made a totally new 3rd game instead of trying to do a cash grab like this remaking a game that already had it's source code released to a fairly active and faithful Savage XR community.

Having said all this...why release the source code for Savage 1, but then just ruin Savage 2 to the point that no one can play it, erase everything about it from your website like it never existed and then NOT release the source code like you did with Savage 1. This is why so many people that play your games hate your company. When you actually had interesting original titles you did nothing to advertise them and just let them fall to the wayside unmaintained. Now all you do is exact copies of other successful games in an attempt to make money. Then you make everyone excited with the announcment of a 3rd Savage game, but it's just a remake of a game that people already play and as soon as things start to go wrong you just try to get the most money out of it as possible. I guess what I'm saying is MAKE THE SOUCE CODE FOR SAVAGE 2 PUBLIC FFS. Or just do anything with this series that isn't ruining a once great thing.

Unfortunately Savage Resurrection was a bait n' switch cashgrab. They tricked quite a few of us.
They never implemented the long-term features that they said they would and as a result the game died swiftly.
S2 Games, LLC is now defunct. Don't expect any updates.

Here I am, coming back to check how much has this game evolved since last time I played it....and I find it abandoned by devs, and with a free to play ninja release last month. Instead of learning new changes and getting ready to play it a little bit more, I find myself here, writing a negative review, after trying all options on support to refund it, lol.

A scam, a robbery. A game with potential abandoned by devs less than a year after.
A buy to play game that goes F2P almost before you can click play ("almost" xD), with no community, no explanation from devs, not even a single object / skin / stupidity to make you feel less of a fool to have paid for it.

Amazing! Owned Savage2 and Heroes of Newerth, from same devs, game without huge community but that lived for longer.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention I purchased this game in Early Access back in May 2016. You know the "support the developers and take part in the developing process of this game blabla".

So it's even worse, it's the perfect cash grab: release a game in EA, release it 4 months after with minimal updates and improvements, and make it Free to Play 4 months after, when devs abandon the ship.

After contacting steam support, the answer, translated to "gamer" is: "shit happens, that's fine, game was in EA dude!".

So gonna be double wary with EA titles from now on!

I loved Savage 1 & 2. I bought Savage Resurrection as soon as I became aware of it. I enjoyed 2 whole days of buggy savage gameplay before the game completely died. This is a multiplayer game only. There are no multiple players. The developers abandoned the game almost immediately. Gameplay is buggy and imbalanced and unfun. There are NO players to play with. This game is dead on arrival. Please, please, do no waste your money on this piece of garbage. You will end up playing by yourself in empty worlds populated by retarded AI commanders incapable performing simple tasks. This is not a pre-alpha game, this is a tech demo cash-grab shitbox designed to steal money from rubes and run. Stay far, far away. This review is coming from major fan of Savage 1 & 2; be warned. You will find no joy here unless you enjoy wasting money on useless shovelware. Stay away.

Sank many hours into Savage 1 competitively many years ago and enjoyed it immensely.

A decade later, a remake of the game appears on steam and I was excited to replay this game again.

30 hours later, I was left very disappointed of this half baked reskinned version of Savage. The game had many limiting factors such as lack of map variation, absence of a player base, human vs. beast imba, terrible AI, and the list goes on. It was an audacity to release this game in such an incomplete state while charging $20 to play it.

I was a fan that loved what this game had to offer, now that is a distant memory.

As somebody with 190+ hours on this game all I can say is: Do not buy this. The game is dead, there are zero players. Now one could say it doesn't make sense to tell people not to buy because there are no players - buying will increase the player count afterall. However the developers handled this game very poorly and abadoned it already. EA was going well and a lot of new features were showing on the horizon. Unfortunately one day it was decided to simply stop EA with tons of bugs still in, bad mechanics (like voting and melee) and missing features like skill rating, replays, melee duels, map editor, etc. Patch frequency went from every 2-3 days to once every two weeks to none. All servers besides EU and NA were already shut down. Tech support is nonexistant. Lot of people can not even launch the game.

Long review coming with some in-depth analysis, but I am trying to provide as much useful information as possible for people who are considering purchasing the game.

First just so you know who this review is coming from. I put thousands of hours into Savage 1 where I was a top competitive commander in the US scene (lifetime competitive record of 77-1-1). In Savage Resurrection, I may have more time in the game than anyone else. I am ranked #1 in total wins, #1 in total score, and near the top of the leaderboard in most other categories. Now onto the review.

The main reason why I do not recommend SavageRes is due to the poor new player experience. SavageRes is lacking a tutorial for learning game mechanics on both the FPS and RTS parts of the game. I watched much of Warowl's stream (a pro-level FPS player, but new to Savage), and he was confused about many things, so I can't imagine how confused the average new player must be.

Essentially the first thing that happens to a new player is that you get thrown into a live game as an FPS player. Now in most modern games, you would get matched up with other new players. However, SavageRes also has no skill-based matchmaking system, so your game likely has a few pro-level players in it. You will get killed again and again and probably not even have any idea why you are dying. An analogy would be if a brand new player got thrown into a game of CS:GO against GeT_RiGhT or into a game of LoL against Faker. Wouldn’t be very much fun right? I believe the new player experience is why 99.9% of the ~50,000 people who have played SavageRes have quit.

If you are interested in the RTS part of the game, the new commander experience is even worse. The only way to practice being a commander is against the really horrible AI commander where both teams are all bots. In a real game, you will ruin the game for your entire team if you play poorly. Or even if you play just average but are matched against an experienced commander on the other team, you will still ruin the game.

Now if you manage to get past the new player experience and stick around, the game is pretty fun. After all, it is the reason why I have played so much. However, the game still has a laundry list of issues that prevent it from being more than just a “good” game. These issues include:

Some people experience crashes or are not even able to start the game.

Lots of bugs. As an example, a few patches ago, a new bug appeared where enemy units die standing up. I’ve seen people shooting at these standing corpses, not understanding that it is a bug and that the player is actually dead.

Lack of optimization. People with top end gaming computers are still getting frame rate loss even while playing on low graphics settings.

Once people are on a server, players can freely join whatever team they want, and there is no in-game skill balancing. Mid-level players will often just wait until they see what team the “good” players join, and then try to follow them onto the same team. This can lead to massively stacked teams.

The game is not VAC-Secured, and there is a confirmed aimbot/maphack available since the game was released. Nothing has been done to address the cheater issue.

The game is decently balanced as far as human vs beast (despite what others less experienced players might say). However, the big “balance” issue is that it is nearly impossible to win a game by just out killing the other team. So the optimal strategy for winning is usually to avoid enemy players and to go after the other team’s workers and buildings. This fact is a problem because the most “fun” part of the game is the player vs player combat, which you must try to avoid if you want to win and not just play a 60-minute stalemate.

Lack of a dueling server (or more generally a “sandbox” server) where people can practice fighting, test out how different weapons and items work, or just hang out while waiting for more players to come online.

Melee combat seems really “clunky”. I have played this game a ton, and I still can’t quite figure out why, but something just seems “off”. I have times where I can swing right through the other player and not score a hit, but other times when I totally miss my opponent, yet I score a hit anyways.

Only 6 maps and no map editor for the community to generate more.

Very poor voting system. Such as no information given on commander experience when he is requesting to command. It is easy to get stuck with a newbie commander. Then it is nearly impossible to pass an impeach vote once you find out that he is actually a newbie. There is also no vote option for next map, restart, etc.

No support for the competitive (e-sport) scene if one were to ever develop. For example, you can’t even have a password protected server to prevent newbies from joining in on a competitive game.

No difficulty setting adjustment on the in-game bots. Bots can dominate new players, but an experienced player can just kite them around with ranged weapons all day.

General lack of useful information in the HUD as to what is going in relation to the overall strategy aspects of the game. For example, I have had games where the enemy team makes a sublair (spawn point) right outside our base. I immediately recognize the game-ending danger. However, despite my best efforts to communicate with my team, no one comes home to defend, and we quickly lose. After the game, half my team is like "how did we lose!"

The commander UI is missing some features that have been found in all RTS games for the past 10 years like being able to queue commands. Also a big feature missing is the ability for the commander to draw on the mini-map in order to let his team know what is going on.

In game VOIP is very buggy. People tell me that I am hard to understand or that they can’t hear me at all.

The in game spectate options are very poor. You can’t chose to spectate a specific person without flipping through every player on the server. You can’t see the HUD of the person you are spectating. You can’t lock onto a player to follow them after they respawn. You can’t see the HP of buildings, players, or the amount for stone left in mines. There is no kill feed.

Steam achievements do not work, eliminating the “carrot” that is found in many modern games. Related to the last point, the leaderboard has very few useful stats reported. Plus some of the stats are bugged, such as player score per minute.

Now the last point in the review is about the game developer, S2Games. In my opinion, if S2 improved the new player experience as well as started addressing some of the other issues on my laundry list, this could be an amazing game; like it could be as big as LoL. Unfortunately, during early access, the players brought up the new payer experience issue as well as all of these other issues, but S2 instead continued to focus development on other areas. It quickly became clear to the players that S2 really has no idea what they are doing. The general consensus from the fan base is that S2 released the game when it was still in early access. There is still much work to be done to "finish" the game.

Unfortunately, it also now seems pretty clear that S2 will not be supporting SavageRes anymore. Other than two minor patches in the last few weeks, there has been no public communication from the developers on the forums in over 1 month. Also, I have the privilege of being part of a private channel with the S2Games developers. But even there, we have not heard anything from the developers in over 2 weeks. So just to warn potential buyers, this recent steam sale seems to be nothing more than one last money grab by S2 for an abandoned game.

I will continue to play this game until it completely dies, because at least for me, the game is still fun. It’s just sad knowing how great this game could be with a proper development team and sufficient resources devoted to it.

I played the original Savage 1 competitively when it first released in 2003, and continued a few years after S2 Games abandoned it. Quit playing games for a couple years, but Savage Resurrection reignited that fire for competitive play again. A few of us returning veterans from different clans united to form a new clan in hopes for another few years of great games. We got one week of okay games at most.

This current 40% off sale is a money grab, and I'm warning potential buyers. The game was released out of the blue when they said it would be marketed, just like this sale is out of the blue with again no word on their social media. The small dedicated community that came back still considers this game early access, and many quit playing when S2 Games did not listen to the community, and made changes that no one ever wanted. It should have never been released a month ago.

We don't know if the devs abandoned this game already because there is no communication, can barely fill half a 16vs16 server, bugs that haven't been fixed, basic features missing, no tutorial or matchmaking for new players, same 6 maps for life (hoping a disgruntled S2 employee can leak out the map editor), etc.

I will continue to play this game a couple hours a day for a round or two if we can get that, but for the most part a clanmate or two, maybe a random player joins, sit in an empty server, and figure out how to climb the mountains. It's a fun challenge for a few more days until we've completed this last map, and unfortunately I don't know if we have a game to keep playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADCJSrVsN8

Don't be misguided by the positive reviews this game is DEAD. There is no one online and there is no single player content. Devs made it pretty clear that they won't be supporting this game anymore. AGAIN, DO NOT BUY.

Its a great game but ive had it for a while now and i have yet to see more than 3 servers being used at the same time and theirs only a total of about 12 people online at a time. So playing a game online with more than 5 or 6 people isnt going to happen. I check in quite often to see if anybody is playing but im lucky to join a game of 8. Community needs to grow. Boring playing by yourself. Too easy. If the community were to grow it would be worth it. But at the moment it is not.

I played the original Savage and wrote a mod for it, Team Status Mod that got rolled into the final release at it's end of life. So I invested a lot of time into the game this one says it's resurrecting.

My first impression is this game should be in early access, not full release. I've noticed several bugs so far which is a buzz kill. The AI pathfinding has problems, but the original had trouble too. The audio is not right, it's missing a lot of sounds of players fighting when I'm looking at them in commander mode. Melee is unresponsive and weightless. I would prefer to see some info about how the team is doing in the UI like my old mod. When I try to repurchase my previous loadout, I only get one medkit instead of the three I got in my previous loadout. The biggest issue is when I tried to play with my friend Rhaythe and our mics got locked into the game. There is no way to disable the game from taking control of my mic, effectively eliminating steam VOIP.

To be sure, these are all issues that can be resolved through updates. However, as a fully released game, these are unacceptable outside of early access so I would recommend checking back later.

fun game for players of the original game. has it's flaws, but still highly entertaining to play.

pro:
- being good makes you better than other players
- gameplay enforces you to work as a team
- fairly balanced (with some exceptions)
- fair price

con:
- very small playerbase
- only a handful of servers (sometiems unstable)
- no skillrating (yet?)
- no options to adjust brightness ingame

Resurrection of a classic RTS/FPS

Very enjoyable game, with a high skill ceiling.

The only downside I can think of is the low playerbase,
and this is due to no advertisement for the game.
So try it out for yourself, and if you like it,
recommend it to a friend.

edit: Devs are throwing out updates like mad. They have some pretty nice things to look forward to aswell (new map, that base WILL EXPLODE). GOOD WORK DEVS :)

One person plays StarCraft. 15 others play WoW Alterac Valley.

Good time for $15 dollars, and even $20 when it's not on sale.

I played the original and Savage XR extensively. Savage Resurrection is actually a good game but it's so reliant on having a community and player base. Most populated servers are US and UK, so if you're not in those regions expect 200-300 ping, which was devastating in the original and in XR but doesn't feel *as* bad in Resurrection. Check how many people are still playing the game too before buying.

The main problem is how the game 'launched' without notice and with minimal marketing. I don't see any news outlets covering the game and myself as a huge Savage fan only discovered the game a week ago after it being in early access for 3 months. The point of a remake is also to surpass, or at least match, what already exists. It's currently lacking:
- Proper tutorials for commanding/duels like XR has (there is a practice mode with bots)
- Map variety (the classics are in but XR literally has thousands)
- Map editor
- Guild/Clan stuff
- Replays

One interesting addition is AI commanders for an 'easy mode' so you don't get one good and one bad commander facing each other. The AI commanders lack any kind of personality though, so it feels like being controlled by a robot (which is true but it doesn't feel as fun). Bot players act realistically enough but have weird quirks like never going siege.

Overall, it's a true enough recreation of the game but it feels like S2's first game all over again. A lot of things have been innovated in recent years to make the multiplayer experience more personal and flavourful — whether it's 'play of the game' and upvoting the top players of the match for player recognition (important for voting commanders and choosing officers in future) or faction/clan/guild stuff — and it would be nice to see these little things help build a community out of the player base.

Would recommend as it's a good game with great potential and it's honestly not that expensive. If development continues fast enough it'll be awesome, otherwise the player base will die very quickly.

A remake of Savage 1/XR from back in the day. This game is crazy fun and one of the highest skillcap games I know of. I would recomend it to anyone who is compeditive and has a drive to improve.

The game is a little rough around the edges as of now. However, the devs are amazing and update almost every week, so I have no doubt that they will get it right.

Pretty fun game.
One player has an overview of the map and plays RTS commander style, while 15 players are FPS units on the ground.
The Commander can be kicked by players in a real match and the commander is voted in initially.
Standard games on the other hand have an AI commander which you can sort of order around a bit "Commander, please prioritize unitname".
For $15 - $20, I'd say that it's worth the price, especially if you have friends who enjoy strategic war games.
There are interesting strategies like rushing a spawn point near the enemy base if they haven't been focusing on anti-building weapons and just ramming your face into their base until you win. Or just taking it slow and eventually sieging them down. Backdooring and stuff is pretty fun if they don't ward up too!

Hear me out before you thumbs down this review.

This game is good, Its beautiful to look at and has enough content to start playing it right now.
My gripe is that this game does not encourage teamwork, it actually promotes solo behaviour and punishes people who try to help the team.

Let me explain. If you try to help base build, or gather resources or defend. You get very little xp and you will quickly be outleveld by the enemy, and find yourself useless.

The game is more or less won, by a single player who has managed to out level everyone else, and proceeds to face roll you for the next 20 minutes. So dont dare take a break to help your team out, only focus on gathering xp for yourself, killsteal, solo farm, do whatever you need to do.

games are won in around 15-20 minutes, very little tug of war, or close calls. Its usually just out right slaughter for one team, not fun at all.

No ammount of teamwork will save you, its really a 'get gud or get rekt' scenario and before you cheer, remember there is only room for one person to do the wrecking in this game, and its most likely not going to be you.

Even games where the high lvl guy is on our team its not fun. There is no build up, no struggle for control points. no winning or loosing by a hairs breadth. Its more or less just follow behind this one guy and place mines, and barracks in areas he clears.

I understand its a skill base game, but when a single player can terrorize your entire team and you dont stand a rats ♥♥♥. its not even fun.

Ive played Savage1 for an infinite amount of time and the rumours about a "remake" made me all tingly.
Savage 2 was innovative but wandered too far from the path.
3rd times the charm right?

Try it! Its hella fun! The game is beautiful on its new unreal4 engine and having implemented the basics from Savage1 games are intense! I know, youre thinking it looks so weird right? What even is a fps-rts game? But my friend, once you set foot on the battleground, you wont regret it! Games are never the same and the possibilities are endless!

Pros and Cons:
+ Beautiful maps and characters
+ The same awesome feeling from working together as I used to get from Savage1
+ Melee is still the most awesome thing about this game, impossible to perfect!

- I dont want this to be just Savage1, I hope they add more ways to alter strategies and tactics
- Learning curve is still steep. Hopefully a good tutorial will teach good basics, and a rating system will seperate veterans and newbies some
- Games tend to linger on forever when both teams and commanders are clueless

Im gonna be playing this for a long time henceforth, see you on the battleground of Newerth! Ophelia is my leader!