Saviors is a modern vertical 3D shoot 'em up following the story of three daredevil pilots. The inevitable first contact with extraterrestrial life may make us believe in things that seem too good to be true. But what happens if everything isn’t as it first seemed like? Includes a fully customizable ship, advanced physics and 18 explosion filled levels in single player or two players co-op mode.
Boring and ugly shmup.
-review based on demo-
The gameplay is good. The enemy patterns and the patterns of bullets you have to dodge is good and the difficulty seems well-tuned. There don't seem to be any powerups or things you have to collect though, which would have spiced up the gameplay a little. Also I think when you take hits it should be a bit more obvious, more visceral.
The main let down for me is the graphics. I'm going to make an odd statement and then try to explain it: The resolution is too high.
What I mean by this is the graphics remind me of certain games that came out for the Atari ST/Amiga and even early days of PC, where the people doing the art for the game seemed to be not good enough at the new higher resolution they were working in, and weren't able to fully-utilize the higher resolution.
It's like, look at the text of the interface, it has these colour gradients on it, almost like, "we have all these colours and resolution available- we have to use it somehow!".
The ships look like clip art floating on a background, they don't blend in. Maybe (a lack of) lighting effects is to blame for this. Are all the ships 3d or are they pre-rendered and stored as sprites?
The various bullets and bolts and missiles that come at you look awful. There's glow effects that really just don't work and are jarring, big orange balls come off one boss but they aren't animated or lit or anything, it's like he's throwing clip-art of beachballs at you.
Then there's the briefing talking heads. They are amateur pre-rendered 3d models with no detail and speech animation like mouth open- mouth closed, and repeat... It really looks like something from the early 90s.
So in closing, the game is good but I really think it would have worked better if they reduced the resolution, replaced the mission talking heads with anime-style static pictures or maybe one picture per "emotion" style. Use low-res but high quality 2d ships and worked harder to understand lighting and glow effects.