Reviews

From a technical point of view, this game is interesting for the way it manages to combine fast movement with a colorful display which overcomes the traditional limits of the Spectrum. As a game in itself, though, it is hardly original. Three rather short parts - run-and-shoot, avoid-the-obstacles in pseudo-3D à la Death Chase and a side-view multi-scrolling maze game - should be negotiated in sequence, each one being separately loaded from tape even on 128K (and without any enhancement to boot). It's not bad, as a whole it is better than the simple sum of its parts in fact - but I'd call it a real case of style over substance.

Three games in one, and a brave explosion of colour, what Savage gains in graphical ambition, amount of game for your money and impressive music, it loses in originality and though gameplay isn't entirely overlooked in favour of animation it isn't of the highest order.

The first load, Level One, is the best, a camp cartoon crusade with Savage on the charge across platforms left to right, run and gun style. Its hard to play but there is some good stuff in there.

Level two, preposterously protected by a password that they gave wrongly at the end of level one (!), is a more ambitous version of Deathchase with some up/down movement and psychedleic colours that only Braxx Bluff can out-weird. Unfortunatley the level gets nowhere near Deathchase for balanced gameplay. I didn't really enjoy it at all.

Level 3 sees you flying a congested side on maze as an eagle. I can see the merit in this, but its really one for the cartographers. It is also very challenging. The eagle gets killed with a series of good animations that you are likely to see a lot. Spiked to death is good, but squashed is my favorite.

The 3 levels are so different from each other and the story line so contorted that you suspect they may have been dragged in from other projects.

So level one is a solid 4 out of 5, level 2, 2 to 3 out of 5 and level 3 3 to 4 out of 5.

I'm giving Savage 3.5/5 and rounding up as level one is the most important bit for the programmers to get right.

Ooooh, look at those colours exploding everywhere.

Quite an impressive looking game. Or 'games' in fact, as you get three in one.

Part one is a running scroller, with lots of colour and big graphics. It's quite hard to figure out what's going on in this section, and having your energy drain constantly makes it quite unforgiving. I was going to try to talk about part two without mentioning its similarity to Deathchase, but I can't really. Part three is where you guide a bird around a claustrophobic, scrolling maze, trying to avoid the enemies and grisly traps, which tends to be extremely difficult. Personally I found part two the best, though I'm aware I'm probably in the minority.

This seems like a good game on paper, but I found something missing from the gameplay for parts one and three. So I'll give those parts 2.5/5 and part two 4/5. So that averages out at 3.Fair enough really.

It's another Perry and Bruty game and it only took 15 seconds for me to determine it was a better game than the last Perry/Bruty game I reviewed Captain Planet. It has the similar classic look but the graphics are indeed better and the gameplay is better too, albeit it's pretty tough. Plus, there are three parts which the other parts need a password, now I haven't bothered with that for this review, but it being in three parts can only mean one thing, the dreaded multi-load which is never a good sign. But saying that, as a game alone, it is good but for me not quite Perry and Bruty's best work, though it's much better than the last one I looked at. It was pretty well received back in the day such as a 9/10 from Your Sinclair and you can clearly see why.