Thanks for the heads up! The original showed a lot of promise.

I played quite a bit of the original's beta. It unfortunately felt like they took a mediocre shooter and a worse RTS and smashed them together. But while the separate parts were crap, the whole was a bit of fun. I hope they improved upon the drawbacks. I haven't read much on Savage 2 since the first few articles were released.

Just finished my first game, had a blast. I was playing the Human-side healer class (Chaplain I think it's called.) Took me a bit to get the hang of the sticky cursor for casting, but once I got the hang of it the controls were mostly good.

Haven't really played as any other units yet, Chaplain is fairly versatile though. He's got your heal (doesn't seem castable on oneself) and group heal (doesn't affect you even if you're in the AE) spells, and a resurrection. That concludes the nice guy portion of his skill bar. The rest includes what I call "Attack Stance" (when it's selected, you can do the three melee combat moves: attack, block, and interrupt, which have a sort of rock-paper-scissors dyanmic, as far as I know, every character has an attack stance, which means even a squishie being played by someone skilled at it could do well, perhaps), a ranged projectile that (unsurprisingly) isn't big on damage, and what I call the "You Die Now" spell, which does something to the target that briefly but MASSIVELY increases weapon damage (it doesn't seem to effect the 'holy bolt' damage.)

One mild surprise: The Chaplain has the iffy defenses you'd expect, but his staff attack actually seems to do okay damage. Make no mistake though, I definitely got pwned anytime a major melee unit closed with me (which started happening somewhat often once I got the hang of healing.) Both heals are on somewhat significant cooldowns, so you definitely have to use your head a little. Add to that your limited mana pool (hint: you MUST have mana potions! Every spawn!) and it's easy to do it wrong (which I spent about the first half of the match doing.)

One thing I liked is that team sizes are strictly enforced. When you join a game, you can only join the smaller team (though you do have the option of waiting for the other team to become smaller.) If team sizes drift apart suddenly due to people leaving one team, the larger team gets a longer respawn timer. We didn't really see much of this mechanic, so I don't know how well it does/doesn't work with regards to making up for a team imbalance, but since people can't join the larger team anyway, I imagine it's probably effective as a stop-gap until new players joining evens it back up.

There are still some minor bugs running around, but I'd definitely recommend signing up today even if you don't have time to play it until after your family togetherness rituals of choice conclude for the year. Now if you'll excuse me, I have people to heal.

I played for about 3 days with Ferret. While I liked a lot of the ideas, the execution in combat just seemed off.
Each class has a very different movement speed which meant it was very easy to get isolated and picked off if you were slower, and impossible to track someone down and kill them if you wounded them seriously and they ran.
The ranged combat (FPS controls) wasn't very satisfying, and I didn't truly get the hang of the Rock-Paper-Scissor style of melee combat either (Attack-Block-AntiBlock).

I did have fun playing it, and I would recommend checking out the demo. In all I probably played close to 8 hours, but I eventually got frustrated and didn't see enough of a reason to stick with it past that.

Lethial - most of the combat is melee, but there are ranged attacks for each class as well that use FPS controls. It's definitely a first person game, but melee combat doesn't rely on mouse twitch or aiming. The ranged controls are irritating because they don't appear to either - aiming is a pain and it at least appears to be somewhat random. I'd guess lag is something of a problem when you have so many players (32) and the maps are so large and open.

Trying the demo probably wouldn't hurt, but I wouldn't throw money around without trying it first.

You can always be a commander and play from the RTS point of view. Also, there is a support class that lets you heal and rez other players, as well as build and repair structures.

I finally got a chance to try out the full release version last night and had a blast. They fixed most all of my issues with the beta. If anyone wants to play some, I am in-game as jakeleg. It would be a fun game to play with a goodjer group. Lots of strategic depth and the melee combat system makes fights more than just left-click over and over.

For what it's worth, this is a pretty fun game. It is still a little rough around the edges, but the mechanics and gameplay are solid. They have overhauled the melee system and balanced a few other things with patches since the release. It has a strategic layer that you won't find in any other FPS with the commander role. The commander is basically playing the game like an RTS - building structures and directing his team from a top-down "eye in the sky" view.

I still play occasionally, but the community is relatively small and hardcore (as it was for Savage 1). If there were enough Goodjers who wanted to play this, it could be fun.

I feel the same way. A couple random samplings today indicate ~4 servers in the world with any population. I'd get it if they had bot support.

I played the first Savage and loved it, played it for a long time. This one does not seem anywhere near as fun. It felt clunky with everything that they threw into the game. The first game had a nice simplicty to it (possible exception being the commander). I'm not against options in the game, that isn't the issue (the additions to TF2 seem great). It just doesn't feel organic to me. Not the most objective or scientific criticism, but the fact is that games are designed so that the player can fit them on like a skin, that's the point of immersion. I just found all the bells and whistles distracting with this version, which I found unfortunate. I'm one of like the 100 people who actually really dug the first game.