Here’s a new weekend feature we’re trying out. Every week we’ll tackle a free web or desktop game for PC, Linux or Mac. I was actually surprised at the amount of quality free games that are available online. We’ll cover every genre, trying to keep it diversified from week to week. My full impressions of Savage after the break.

I heard of Savage when it came out, but never played it until a couple of months ago when I heard it was now free. The game is one of the first games I see mixing the First Person Shooter genre with another genre. That would be the Real Time Strategy genre.

How does a FPS/RTS work? Savage gives you a choice between two races, Humans and Beasts. Once you chose your side, your team needs a Commander. The commander is the one with a god’s eye view of the game — he plays with an RTS interface. All the other players on the team will be playing in the FPS mode they’ll be the commander’s warriors. I’ll explain both the commander and the warriors below.

When playing as the commander, you have your regular RTS interface — you see your main base and you start with some workers that you can use to gather your resources. You also see the players on your team, and the rest of the map is hidden by the fog of war. You can build structures with your workers that will give you upgrade options that your warriors will be able to use. New character classes, new weapons and new items are some of the upgrades you’ll be able to get once you have the required buildings built. Another neat feature of being the commander is the option to give commands to your warriors, the other players on your team. Once you select one or more of them, you can tell them to move to a certain area or attack a certain target. This will send a command text to the target player telling him either to move here or attack this with a direction and a distance. The warrior doesn’t need to listen to your command, but he should since the commander is the one that sees what’s going on on the map.

Now on the warriors side, you start with a single class to choose from. If you want to get access to more classes and weapons faster, you can help the commander by harvesting resources with his workers and bringing them to home base. The controls for the warriors need some getting used to. All classes are melee by default, so left click is your basic attack and depending if you’re playing as humans or beasts you get a secondary move with right click. With humans, the right click is a block and with beasts it’s a leap. Now this is where the game gets interesting and complicated. At first you’ll think that the beasts are overpowered with their leap, leaping everywhere and not giving you a chance to hit them. Then once you learn how to block, blocking will stun the beast who’s attacking you for a second or two, giving you the opportunity to pull a three hit combo and most likely kill him.

All the weapons that the commander can research for you are ranged weapons. From experience, they’re not as strong as your regular melee attack, but they’re good for weakening the enemy at long range before hitting him in melee for the final blow.

Savage is a multiplayer-only game. You need to give the game a chance, because the learning curve is pretty steep. Timing is everything when fighting in melee. Practice makes perfect they say.

Official Site
Download Page (Windows and Linux)
Download Page (Mac)
Screenshots