Savage Skies

"It's savage, alright"

I really wanted this game to be good because dragons are cool. I really tried to like it. However, it came up short in so many ways.

The first thing that left a bad impression on me was the music. When the game starts up, it shows a cinematic scene of a red dragon flying through a valley, and a black dragon comes after him. The scene is fine, but the rock 'n' roll music caught me off guard. Maybe it's just me, but rock 'n' roll doesn't exactly fit in with a high fantasy setting. It's anachronistic. As far as rock 'n' roll goes, this music is pretty dull. In fact, I'm having difficulty remembering most of the game's soundtrack. It's rather forgettable.

So this ugly black dragon is pursuing this red dragon through the valley, breathing fireballs at him (or perhaps some sort of poison... a poisonball?). Then the red dragon breathes a gout of napalm on the forest he's flying over, setting the forest ablaze. He flies through the raging forest fire (he's a red dragon; he's immune to fire and smoke). The black dragon comes to a halt, and his skeletal rider lifts his hand to shield his eyes from the blaze. Then the red dragon flies right through the blaze, letting forth another gout of fire. I was like, "Whoa! Can we do cool stuff like that in the game?" Forget it. This game doesn't offer anything so interesting.

Savage Skies presents us with a three-in-one story. There are three factions vying for control of this high fantasy realm. The virtuous Virtwyn kingdom, the neutral Chrysalis collective, and the evil Pariah empire. The game is split into three campaigns, each representing an alternate reality wherein that faction eventually emerges victorious.

Each campaign has eight missions and a secret mission that must be unlocked. Each mission has a primary set of objectives, an optional secondary objective, and an optional secret objective. The secret objective isn't revealed until you find a secret power crystal (which also improves your special ability). Completing secondary and secret objectives unlocks... well, unlockables. Playable creatures, new game modes, two-player maps, and other cool stuff.

So, you select which faction you're going to root for, then play its campaign in sequence. The view is third person from behind your creature. The HUD (heads up display) shows your creature's health, his energy, his armor if he has any, a small radar map, and a directional arrow that points you to waypoints and mission objectives.

Each mission saddles you with a different creature. The Virtwyn have a roc, a pegasus, a large winged cougar, a giant owl, and traditional dragons (fire dragon, frost dragon, and so forth). The Chrysalis have some strange creatures. Poisonous swamp lizards, wyverns, an eastern dragon (he has no arms or legs), a bug-like creature, an eyeball with wings and tentacles, and a flying manta ray. The Pariah's menagerie is even more bizarre. Winged demons, a skeletal bone dragon, a large bat, a large flying pig, and a vomit-spewing rat.

Each creature has a different size, speed, agility, stamina, health, and his own style of attack. Some can heal themselves, and some have magical defensive shields. Most of them have a long-ranged attack (fireballs, projectiles) and a short-range/melee attack (napalm breath, frost breath, and so on). You can forget about using the latter to create forest fires like we saw in the opening cinematic. The only scenery that this game lets you tear up is scenery that's meant to be torn up. You can raze a village or structure when one of the objectives calls for it. The rest of the scenery is immune to the carnage going on around it.

Using the long-range attacks is a challenge. Some creatures fire off high-speed projectiles while others fire slow-moving ones. In each mission, I had to get used to that creature's "lead ability", which is how far ahead of an enemy combatant you have to fire in order to hit him while he's flying around. Lots of trial and error.

In addition, you have "crystal seekers", which can lock onto an enemy flyer, and a special power. A magical attack, healing, or defensive shield, depending on which campaign you're playing. Finding those secret crystals improves your crystal seekers and special power.

The levels are quite large. There's plenty of scenery to explore, including much extraneous scenery around the main theater of action. Power-ups are scattered about. You can get health, shields to increase your armor, spiked mines that you can drop for a pursuer to ram into, the occasional invulnerability and invisibility, and a couple others. Sometimes these power-ups are difficult if not impossible to see because they blend in with the color of the sky. For that matter, cloud layers in the sky and fog near the ground sometimes obscure the presence of enemy creatures. To help you find the nearest enemy flyer, he gets highlighted with a circle when on-screen or an arrow points you in his direction when he's off-screen. The highlight is green for a healthy enemy, yellow for a damaged creature, and red for someone who's near death. For the most part, this feature is helpful, but sometimes it doesn't seem to work. There were times when enemy flyers were all over the place and the highlight would not lock onto one of them (they're often hard to find without it). The green circle (or arrow) also sometimes blends in with the color of the sky or a thick cloud bank and becomes difficult, if not impossible, to make out. Engaging in dogfights without this feature is very difficult. The action is often fast-paced, and the competition is fierce.

The controls are reasonable. Nothing too outlandish here. Speed up, slow down, hover, fire primary weapon, fire secondary weapon, fire crystal seekers, use item. There are also some special moves like barrel roll, speed boost, and power dive. You can land on the ground and walk around, though I didn't have much cause to do this.

Mission objectives are the usual tripe that you'd see in a mission-oriented game. Defend the convoy, destroy the enemy convoy before time runs out, rescue the prince, yadda yadda yadda. You're always doing something that's meant to be significant, and sometimes it is (defending your home or laying siege to an enemy stronghold). More often than not, though, the scenarios are never fully explained. Some of these missions are downright incoherent. I had the most fun with the simple "seek 'n' destroy" scenarios. During a couple missions, I stuck around after the primary objectives had been completed just to do some old fashioned carnage. I'll go to the waypoint marker and end the mission when I'm ready, thank you. Hey, I have to get some fun out of this game.

Secondary and secret objectives range from "complete the mission in 4 minutes" to "destroy a specific enemy target". Many of them are silly "go out of your way to do this thing while still completing the mission" type things. Then there are the crystals (which reveal what the secret objective is). Each mission has one, and it could be anywhere. Many of them are hidden well away from the main theater of action. Some required an ungodly amount of looking around before I finally found them. I completed some of the secret objectives before I found the crystals. I was just flying around blowing stuff up or quickly dealing with enemy advancements so that I could look for the crystal without losing the primary objective. The crystals and various objectives actually do a great job of detracting from this game's appeal.

Let's move on. Enough about the game-play. The visuals are pretty good. Great-looking scenery. Buildings, castles, towns... Farmland, swamps, river canyons... Airships, sail barges... The scenery is impressive and appealing. In some levels it's raining or snowing, or lightning lances down from storm clouds above. The effects are great. There's quite a bit of pop-up, though. It's especially noticeable when you fly toward a mountain or large structure. The dragons and other creatures all look fine. No complaints there. This game shines in the effects department. Fireballs, napalm breath, wide area-affect poison waves... It all looks great. Some of the creatures set off spectacular fireworks displays.

The sound effects are also great. The creatures are very animated and make a variety of roars, growls and screeches when they attack or get hit. The large birds make appropriate squawking sounds. The flying pig oinks. The giant owl hoots. As mentioned, the music is absolutely forgettable.

The voice acting here is atrocious, for the most part. When you start a campaign, an opening cinematic and voice-over tell the story. This guy is so melodramatic, even I was blushing a bit. It's gawd awful. The Virtwyn and Pariah voice-overs are equally overacted. The Virtwyn guy has an annoying air of dramatic urgency. He sounds like he's constantly worried that the mission is going to end in a dismal failure. I don't care if the prince has been captured. Take a chill pill, dude. The Pariah guy speaks with over-accentuated snarls and evil "Mwahaha!" laughs, just so we get that he's evil. He's often so over the top with his "I'm evil" routine, it's laughable. Nobody in their right mind talks this way.

The Chrysalis voice-over is better. She's more down to earth, but she's at times hard to understand because they gave her an echo effect (I guess they thought we wouldn't "get it" if the Chrysalis hive mind spoke with a single, coherent voice). The Pariah guy does have some amusing things he says when you make a kill on an enemy flyer. "A natural born killer!" "You murderer! I love it!" "Watching you kill is truly entertaining!" And my personal fave, "You're psychotic! No remorse whatsoever!" Yeah, baby! That's why I bought this game! To do some old fashioned carnage and go on a murderous rampage, raining death and destruction from the sky, burn-inating the countryside, taking no prisoners, and--! What? Oh, the review. Ah-hem.

I played this game on the "easy" setting (there's also normal, hard, and savage), and it was pretty difficult. The enemy flyers are very efficient at doing damage and being hard to hit. The Virtwyn campaign is supposed to be easy while the Chrysalis is rated as hard and the Pariah gets a "savage" billing. I found the Chrysalis easier than the Virtwyn. Got all of the bonuses there (including all of the dumb crystals) on my first run-through. It took quite a bit of trial and error to get all of the Virtwyn and Pariah bonuses. Part of the problem is that the voice-over doesn't tell you what to do during crucial moments (like finding and rescuing that stupid prince). It would also help if they'd tell me that those are friendly airships I'm breathing frost breath on. I thought they were firing their cannons at me! Some of the mission objectives require similar trial and error measures.

I think we've covered everything here. Idiotic story, typical mission-based tripe, great visuals, great-looking scenery, lackluster soundtrack, great effects, awful voice acting, a few amusing lines here and there, and a game with many irritating side-quests. There's quite a learning curve involved before the game starts to get decent. Knowing where to go, what to do, and where all those dumb crystals are makes it a bit more fun. Some parts are actually quite fun. The dragons are cool, as is the aerial combat. The large levels full of interesting scenery would be fun to explore if there was time to do so. Instead, we're usually saddled with defending this, defending that, and sometimes just struggling to stay healthy.

A truly great game will make me feel like playing it again and again. This one fell way short of accomplishing that. As it stands, I'm glad it's over.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 02/23/05