It's all about survival of the fittest or at least the one wielding the iron club
The recent success of a number of games whereby the character is left in an open world to fend for themselves has quite an effect on the gaming community. The likes of Rust, DayZ, H1Z1 and so on are games that place the player in a first person environment and see just how they last in such a world. It's an interesting concept and one we quite like.
Savage Lands, from developer DigitalDNA Games, is one of the newer entries into the survival fantasy world. You, as the main character have found yourself marooned on the shores of a strange land, where there is a menagerie of beasts and a collection of Harryhausen-esque animated skeletons.
You start on a beach, with nothing but a few tattered shreds of cloth to preserve you decency and keep you warm. From there you are given a checklist of micro-quests, found in your journal: gather stones, wood, find a primitive weapon, kill deer, make a campsite and so on.
After a while, you get the gist of the various keybindings and where to find the essential components to craft the items you'll need to both tick off the check list and, ultimately, survive. As you would expect from such a game, crafting is the only way you're going to get anywhere. After killing off your first few deer, you'll be able to use sinew, deer hide and wood to fashion some better amour and clothing, and eventually you'll be able to use bone and wood to make a better weapon than the crude hammer you'll eventually find lying around on the beach.
It's a familiar setup, but we did like the way the developers have handled the crafting of a structure. In this instance, you can have the core materials and place the structure - such as a lean-to, for example - and add to it as yougather more logs, sinew, hide or whatever else it is you need. And the structure will remain in a semibuilt state indicating the missing components until it's finally built. It's a small element of gameplay, but one that means you're not constantly having to forage, drop, forage, drop, for the best part of an hour or so.
The game itself is still in the alpha stages, so an Early Access Game on Steam there are naturally one or two issues you'll no doubt come across. We did have a few glitches where we became stuck between outcropping rocks or the deer we were hunting became a part of a tree.
Graphically, think of Savage Lands as a kind of cross between H1Z1 and Skyrim. It certainly looks good, despite the occasional glitch, and your character moves semi-realistically throughout the environment.
Added to all this is fact that you can host or join a server based game and invite your friends into the world with a password enabled game. Alternatively, you can go it alone in a solo instance or join one of the many globally hosted servers. Either way, there's plenty to get your teeth into.
This is not a bad game to get in early with, to see how long you can survive for before you get picked off by a bear, wolf, skeleton or some other nameless horror and to see how far into the game to manage to progress. It's a gamble, to a degree, as there's no guarantee that the game will ever be finished or succeed alongside other titles of this genre. That means, at £19, we think it's a bit of an expensive gamble. David Hayward
A tad expensive for something that's so far from being finished.