There’s not a lot of prehistoric games around these days. I recall having a game on NES called “Trog” and also managed to dip my toes in Far Cry Primal which was a nice offshoot of the series back in the day, but casting my mind to recent times, I couldn’t name a current-gen caveman game. Savage Age sets out to rectify this as a prehistoric puzzler, survival, and tower defense game. It’s certainly an ambitious task to bring this group of Genres together. What’s it Like? Sharpen your spear, cover yourself in some long grass, and watch out for wild boars as we review Savage Age on Nintendo Switch.
The story of Savage Age follows a tribesman set to recover an artifact after it was stolen by a ruthless rival tribe. So begins a journey across 20+ chapters to recover what was rightfully yours. During your journey, you will learn to hunt, craft, and defend yourself against the threats of the prehistoric world.
At its heart, Savage Age plays like a puzzle game, crossed with a classic isometric platformer. There are other elements to the game like construction and tower defense, but these functions seem like they could have been implemented better, as crafting boils down to walking near a tree to chop it, or gathering vines simply by walking to them, then walking near a bench where your character throws the items down to morph into a new creation. This process, especially when you can only carry 2 items at a time, makes crafting a never-ending series of mini-fetch quests, which eventually grates on you as you simply want to explore. Your inventory also resets every level, so there’s no point in stockpiling items to take with you. You have chapters to work through which initially charge you with completing simple puzzles and crafting criteria, before slightly opening up to some tower defense moments that seem out of place.
Graphically, the art direction is a cel-shaded, cartoon-style engine that does a decent job of building the world. Your character looks cartoony, and entities in the world suit the style which is somewhat reminiscent of the PS1 era of Isometric adventure games. There’s not a whole lot of variety in environment and enemies, but it does a good job with what’s on offer, making wild hogs menacing, and fighting enemy tribesmen a daunting experience. You can also use grass to camouflage yourself to sneak past obstacles. If spotted, you’re pretty much done for unless you are able to ready a weapon in time, which is made all the more difficult due to slow-paced movement.
My biggest issue with Savage Age is that it almost seems to be running in slow motion the entire time you play. It seems to be a performance issue as far as I can tell, as the Steam Version runs at a much faster, and most likely enjoyable pace. On the Nintendo Switch, however, you simply perform all actions including walking at a snail’s pace, making any sort of progression an exercise in tedium and frustration. I feel like with Savage Age, the core mechanics may be there but the pacing and out-of-place tower defense just doesn’t really work with the speed of control style in its current state. A post-launch patch to speed things up would certainly go a long way.
For my vision-impaired cave people, there are no accessibility options, so further research may be required to find out if Savage Age is for you. At $20 AUD, Savage Age is reasonably priced, but gamers may struggle to be fully absorbed in the game at the present time with the current “slow motion” and sluggishness of the title.
So, What’s it Like? Savage Age is like a hybrid Pandemonium on PS1, mixed with puzzle elements of Abe’s Odyssey.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this does not influence my score.
I want to end this review by acknowledging that Savage Age is made by one man, and it’s a decent game that has a few issues settling into the Switch hardware. If you have a PC and like the look of this game, Savage Age on Steam runs a lot faster and sits with mostly positive reviews. Here’s hoping Savage Age gets some post-launch optimization, and I look forward to seeing what’s next from HiddenBlade Studio.
