Savage

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You play Savage, a muscular warrior who was imprisoned inside an evil castle. In level 1, a labyrinth of dark and gloomy dungeons hides a myriad of demons and ghouls, all ready to put a bloody end to his attempts to escape. Savage is attacked by a number of deadly mutant monsters. Once killed, they will yield a piece of weaponry that will enable Savage to continue his fight. He is able to collect items that increase his energy, shield himself from the enemy attacks or even increase his energy level. At the end of each level Savage comes across the Guardian of the dungeon. Upon defeating the defenders of the dungeon, Savage escapes from the Castle and is now free to enter Death Valley in level 2. In this level the gameplay changes to a first person perspective into a pseudo 3D environment, in which Savage must escape from the area by seeking ways to shoot down the attackers (ghosts and lurking skulls) and avoid monoliths that rise. But halfway through the attacks in the valley, Savage discovers that his escape from the castle is just a trick to keep his Maiden love imprisoned forever! He then returns to the Castle to rescue her but now he is unable to enter it so he calls upon his trusty eagle to fly into the Labyrinths. The game now is in level 3 in which the perspective changes to a multi-directional action shooter where you fly the eagle through the corridors of the Labyrinth, searching for specific items and battling the last of the demons and monsters that now fight for the final victory. The corridors are swarmed by deadly traps like pitfalls with spikes, dropping stones and others. This game is one of the 8bit home-computers' finest! The gameplay is addictive, the visuals and sounds are superb but the difficulty level is rather high due to the huge sprites and the increased, non-stop number of enemy hordes that occupy half the screen!

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The CPC version has beautiful visuals with nicely drawn backgrounds and detailed sprites, and the colors are brighter compared to the C64 and ZX versions. Both foreground and background scroll quite smooth. The sprites' animation is superb, offering plenty of smoothly animated frames, a rather impressive detail for the CPC's hardware capabilities! There is a noticeable frame rate drop when a large number of sprites occupy the screen, but still, the game plays good. As far as the sound, the Amstrad version has a nice intro music as well as several sound effects during gameplay (but no in-game music). Comparably, note that the C64 counterpart has a wonderful sampled in-game tune when selected!

GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Sinclair ZX spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and Amiga OCS versions of the game.