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A Savage Return

With the inability to play Argo, Living After War still in closed beta, and lacking the ability (not to mention the desire) to play Fantasy Earth, I turned to Savage 2 – A Tortured Soul to satisfy my fix for a good MMO RTS hybrid.

For those of you that don’t know what an RTS hybrid is it’s a type of action game where either everyone or a single person can build structures to aid and support his team or fum buck them more quickly if he feels like griefing. Imagine you’re playing Age of Empires with your friends (I’m assuming you have some cause I’m a nice guy like that) except now picture that only one of you is actually playing and everyone else is scampering around as the ‘units’ that one person would normally be pouring out of the barracks, and that’s Savage in a nutshell.

When you enter the game you have a choice of either siding with steam punk like humans or (brace yourself for this) The Horde, a combination of animalistic like creatures ranging from wolves to bats to what I assume to be trolls. The two of them are in an epic resource struggle which takes place in the lands of (again brace yourself) NewEarth. Apparently the guy at the patent office went out clubbing that night and Savage just assumed “Well if here’s not here I guess the answer is yes!”

Aside from being a MMO version of Warcraft (because everyone knows that hasn’t been done before), Savage 2 –ATS has another major issue. It sells itself under the promise of being a First Person Shooter MMO, and yet the first thing you’re told when you enter the tutorial is “Don’t rely on your ranged weapons.” Does this make any since at all? It’s like if an MMORPG tutorial said “Whatever you do, don’t complete any quests.” Ranged weaponry is frowned upon at every turn. There’s no stat that supports it, and there is only 1 item that increases your ranged damage by a rather pathetic amount. It makes me wonder why they made The Horde (cough) put such a heavy reliance on squishy casters who are better off at range but are expected to fight in melee none the less.

As far as stat points go there’s no point in leveling anything besides Strength (which ups your MELEE damage) and endurance (Which ups health regen and reduces damage by a small amount) mana regen and stamina regen will both be more than covered by the items you buy and find on the field. The DoTA style of doing things which to me sort of comes off as lazy in any other form of MMO.

Yet for all its faults and issues I can’t hate the game. The RTS Hybrid is a unique miracle of gaming which honestly I think is way too few and far too far between, and I can honestly see myself playing it for quite some time. At least until I get enough money to afford Nuclear Dawn.

Savage 2- A Tortured Soul scores 6 out of 10

Another review sponsored in part by the “We want to be Blizzard” Corporation. Thank you for your funding.

A Call To Champions

I invite the players of League of Legends to play a little drinking game for me. Take a shot every time Phreak says “tons of damage” in his spotlight….

What’s that? Drunk already after one spotlight? Well go and sober up and come back and I’ll tell you about a REAL MMO

Say hello to Champions Online, the most amazing super hero MMO ever made. Yes I have played and taken into account City of Heroes and that bastard child of a comic book and game known as DCU Online, and Champions Online is just all around better.

Mind you no game is without its flaws, CO may be free to play, but lots of good stuff you have to pay for, I had to take a week off of the game while I waited for the points to buy the class I wanted to play, but I can’t really blame the game for PayPal’s fault. None the less, having to pay for the good stuff is a No No for games no matter how good they are. On the upside, CO features an extremely lavish character customization builder. Even if you have to buy some of the REALLY good stuff, there are still enough options to build EVERY champion in League of Legends and still have enough left over to build half of Heroes of Newearth. The possibilities are endless and limited to only your imagination; needless to say with so many unoriginal people in the world you will see superman, batman, and everyone else from every super hero cartoon ever made.

Now then onto the plot; the tutorial sets you in a city under attack by evil alien invaders, this runs you through all the controls as well as the play styles before setting you into the games massive, unrestricted, invisible wall-less environment filled to the brim with your typical story quests which can unfortunately get kinda grindy… to party made instances and even (dare I say) “dynamic events” which put un partied teams of heroes together to tangle against rioters, jailbreaks, and everything else you can think of. They’re not as dynamic as what Guild Wars 2 has in mind, mainly because there’s no since of failure if you can’t complete an objective, partially due to the fact that most of them are UNFAILABLE. They could have done much more with that but I’m still not complaining because it was a lot of fun. I found myself playing each instance many times over and it never got boring.

If I had any advice it’s the obvious ones from a gamer point of view. Make at least every class available, cause paying for everything else is actually smart. Cosmetics is the quickest (and best) way to make money with a game, but limiting our creativity defeats the lavish customization options, and also give the dynamic events a sense of realism. If we fail to stop the jailbreaks make prisoners flood the streets and terrorize the city’s inhabitants. Give us a sense that what we’re doing matters for a reason other than we get extra loot and experience points.

I give Champions Online an 8 out of 10 I can’t wait to see new heroes in the lands of
Meleenium City.