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Blending genres has been put to the ultimate test with Savage: The Battle for Newerth. Real Time Strategy combined with a First Person Shooter? Someone must be smoking crack. There’s no way someone can strategically command a group, build necessary buildings AND focus on a crazy firefight, is there? Not really, but S2Games has solved that problem by keeping the commander who plays the RTS portion in a bird’s eye view of the environment while everyone else performs the FPS grunt work.

Warriors in Savage: The Battle for Newerth participate in direct combat and menial grunt work. Up to 62 warriors can be in each game and the numbers on each side are not always equal. Each task a warrior completes gives that warrior experience. Killing enemies or mob creatures can give the warriors gold. Experience improves the abilities of the warrior’s current unit while gold can be used to purchase upgraded weapons and equipment. Warriors can mine resources, hunt the creatures of Newerth, skirmish the opponent independently or work with the other warriors in a massive assault. Unlike most FPS games, in Savage: The Battle for Newerth, a gung-ho attitude gets you and your team nowhere while teamwork gets you everywhere. The lone gunman who decides to pull a full frontal attack on an enemy encampment will usually get his ass handed to him very quickly with nothing to show for it besides losing his upgraded avatar. Instead of merely having the goal of killing the most people, Savage: The Battle for Newerth gives the warriors goals common to units in an RTS such as capturing respawn points, protecting resources, sabotaging the enemy’s buildings and resource locations, and securing strategic areas of the map are all duties of the warriors.

Clicking is the name of the game for warriors. In order to attack, the warrior must click on the target. Each successive hit must be triggered by a click by the player. This is understandable, as the developers probably didn’t want an automatic weapon feel for the players. What I don’t understand is why warriors must click repeatedly in order to build, repair, or mine. After a while I switched my mouse around to the other side of my keyboard to give my other set of fingers a workout. If there’s anything I would have liked changed about Savage: The Battle for Newerth, it would have been some way to set your character on automatic when it came to building, repairing, or mining. Oh my aching index finger!

A complaint I found with fans of RTS games is that there are only two races in Savage: The Battle for Newerth, the humans and the beasts. While the style of play does keep people from thinking about the lack of choices for a while, it does eventually get to the point where people, especially commanders desire a little more variety. Each race has three basic warrior types and two siege weapon types. Humans are given access to bows, guns, and technological weapons while Beasts are given access to various forms of magic. The human and beast warrior units are very similar in ability and statistics but the siege weapons are exceedingly different. The ballista and catapults of the humans fire more quickly but are wheeled and lack maneuverability while the summoners and behemoths of the beasts are living creatures which can move just as any other albeit slowly.

The commanders of each side are the people who actually view the game as an RTS. This is the aspect that I preferred most during my dozens of hours of game playing enjoyment. It took more than a couple games as a newbie commander before I felt comfortable with the layout of the game. During my first three or four games I was dogged to no end by “veteran” warriors who couldn’t help but notice that I was new and wasn’t getting done what needed to get done when it needed to get done. Despite all the insults and complaints I kept with it and eventually learned how to be an acceptable commander. From what I gather from chatting with people in game about the learning curve of being a commander, it’s the same with everyone. It’s the people who stick with it for a bunch of games that actually make it to be “sought after” commanders.

Commanders give orders to the peons and warriors to build and gather resources in addition to researching technology which gives your team access to new weapons and upgraded units. Fortunately for the warriors but unfortunately for the commander, Savage: The Battle for Newerth isn’t a game where the warriors are mindless drones willing to do anything the commander tells them to do. Newbies especially had a tendency to go out on their own at the start of a game when the warriors are needed most for menial chores. After a few games though, warriors figure out that listening to the commander, although boring during the first ten minutes or so of the game, does give the team a much better chance of succeeding. It also helps that personal gold for the warriors is usually quite limited and the better weapons and items are expensive. The commander may purchase weapons and items for the player with the team’s gold. This puts things into perspective with those warriors who say, “I don’t need no stinking commander!”

Unfortunately for those fans of both RTS and FPS games, there is only one mode of play in Savage: The Battle for Newerth. Essentially, every game is a complicated version of capture the flag… where the flag is the opposing team’s base. Number of kills, strategic points on the map, completed tech tree, and amount of resources only count as much as they assist in the capture of the opposing team’s base. The game is constantly being revamped by the development company with patches for balance purposes. New units, gameplay modes, and mod kits all promise to turn the current limited choices in the game into limitless variety when one takes into account the random factor of new groups of players.

The graphics presented in Savage: The Battle for Newerth while not extraordinary definitely solidly stand up to the above average modern game. Environment and character models are rendered more like a top notch RTS than FPS, that is not to say that it cannot compete. Considering the monumental task of rendering both the FPS views and the RTS view for the commander simultaneously, I applaud the graphics designers and their engine. Environmental effects such as daylight changing into night and grass and clouds moving with the wind give Savage: The Battle for Newerth a small life of its own. The sound effects for the game were wonderful. It was easy to determine what weapons are being used in the vicinity and generally what direction they are coming from. The voice commands given to the warriors were greater in number than I had expected with more than enough to give most commands in the heat of battle. The musical score was obviously computer generated and generally quite boring.

Overall I found Savage: The Battle for Newerth addictive as caffeine. I found myself waking up in the middle of the night craving just one more game. While not the most visually or sonically pleasing of games, it does what it was meant to do in bringing together two very popular, wonderful genres into one magnificent gaming experience. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys either RTS or FPS games or anyone who finds the concept of the blending of the two even slightly intriguing.