Savage Warriors

The Good
At first glance, Savage Warriors seems like it has a lot going for it: Slick animated intro, innovative character animation engine (think 3-D "skeletal bones and joints" applied to 2-D sprites), and some nice interactive backgrounds. Some special moves, some hidden characters, some cute cheat commands... what's not to like?

The Bad
Sadly, Savage Warriors has some fatal flaws in some extremely key areas. The biggest oversight is the enemy AI -- they fight like poorly-controlled puppets. Maybe it was just me and my difficulty setting, but they would sit there and take blow after blow (sometimes from the same special move simply repeated), and then perform moves with inhuman timing. This was not a "challenge"; it was, however, frustrating.

Something else about the game bugs me even to this day: You can interact slightly with your environment -- hang from overhead structures, swing on a vine, etc. Here's the catch: Once you're up there, you can't fire and aim missle weapons. So what good is it to be hanging from a pole or swinging on a vine if you can't attack the person on the ground below you? What's the point?

The sound and music is okay, but the "Fight!" speech before each match has a distinct French accent. To an American, it's irritating to hear "fight" mispronounced -- slowly -- as "Foight!" 27 times in an hour.

All in all, I just get a bad vibe about Savage Warriors. It's just not fun to play.

The Bottom Line
I really tried to like Savage Warriors, I really did -- I played it for almost 4 hours! But after 4 hours, the only "fun" I had was in cracking the game to figure out what the cheat codes were. What a disappointment...

Bad vibes, man. Bad vibes.