Savage Warriors

"One of the most falsely advertised games of all time"

I remember the day I saw the ad for this game in my PC Gamer magazine, which at the time was Electronic Entertainment I beleive. The ad featured half a skeleton, with the tagline 'so many ways to kill your opponent, who can choose?!', with the rest of the page adorned with screenshots, which were so blurry you couldn't tell what was going on...which I suppose was done on purpose, since the tagline under each picture said 'Crushing skulls with a rock' and 'Impalement and evisceration!' and 'Burn alive and disembowl!'. The pictures, since they were hard to discern, pretty much gave the illusion that this was a bloody fighting full of nasty finishing moves...and that couldn't be any further from the truth.

Jumping on the 'I'm better than Mortal Kombat II' bandwagon that was popular in 1995, Savage Warriors claimed to have features that would rival Mortal Kombat II and make it obsolete. For example, the game advertised 'ultra gory gameplay' and 'background interaction' and 'ultra-realistic looking characters and backgrounds'. As for backing up these claims, Savage Warriors had NO gore whatsoever...despite the advertisement which claimed you could impale opponents on spikes, incinerate them, crush their heads with rocks, disembowel them...there wasn't an ounce of blood or gore in the game. In fact, you had to put in a special cheat code which would then enable a 'gore mode' which was nothing more than a series of red spots that appeared around the character when you hit them...they were not animated, they were simply red dots that appeared around the character for about one second after the initial hit...there's your gore. There were no fatalities of any kind despite the blood-soaked advertisement. As for 'background interaction', that consisted of the occasional rock that you can jump onto which elevated you about a foot above your opponent, or a small water pool which put you about a foot below the opponent. And as for realistic lookin characters and backgrounds...some of the characters DID look pretty convincing, and some of the backgrounds were great.

The entire game was built up around a lie...the manufacturers advertised blood and gore to hook the MK2 crowd, and it worked on me...and I must say I was 'Savagely Disappointed' by this. It did nt live up to anything it stated, and was an overall average, boring fighting game with nothing to set it apart from other games. If you have the chance to play this, don't bother. Its not worth your time.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 03/27/04