Well im not sure how to start this since this is my first review of the game. I purchased this game prolly about a year ago with a few of my friends the game was fun and hard, like just finding enough food to stay alive hard. but it was very early in the games career. we played for a bit and then for whatever reason we stopped playing.

Last night we were having a hard time firguring out what game we wanted to play and came back accross this game and were curious to see how things have progressed. took us a few minutes to recapture our bearings on how the game works and before you can make your first bags and boxes inventory management is huge.

Day 1: We run around franticly trying to figure out how to build a shelter and such and start to realize we are not going to get one done before night falls. Night hits and we are huddled around a campfire trying not to freeze to death. get warm enough and tired of staying put so i figure i will go get some more stone to work on things. walk towards a rock and i hear them before i notice them. It's a pack of wolves, so i quickly retreat to the fire hoping like real wild animals they will want to stay away from the campfire. we also manage to encounter a few skelletons which we just dodge the easily choreographed moves and club them down.

Day 2: notice something about making some bigger bags, so i spend the day chasing down and clubbing boars for food and supplies. wandering around the woods i hear wierd noises i attribute to the pigs. Then i hear the flapping and realize as the trees around me burst into flame that it was not a simple boar after all. Panic sets in as i glance up at the sky trying to see what the heck is trying to burn me to a crisp. so i start running inbetween trees and rocks hoping to lose him. after what i assume to be a few more strafing runs looking for me he must have left cause the sounds vanished.

Day 3: By now we have got some decent supplies gathered and have learned how to fight the various beasts in the area: Boars, Wolves and Skeletons. We find a ruined town of sorts with a glowing red skeleton in the center of it. decide we are going to see what hes made of. i go in first to see if i can figure out his attack patter without being murdered. He lunges at me, I sidestep in what i feel is just in time and give him a smack with my stone sword and notice his heath bar barely moves. At that moment we knew we were in for a long fight of hit and run tactics. After what felt like was about 10 minutes we brought him down. Soon after we are making our way back to our base and i hear it again. this time the dragon has now set its sights on my friend. he uses a giant boulder to dodge the dragons 3 strafing runs before the beast appears to have lost interest with him and left.

That was our couple day experience in the game, needless to say we are going to be making another trip into the Savage Lands to see what other adventures we have in store.

Pros:
Dangerous enemies.
While some of the moves they have are somewhat easy to dodge. that one time you don't you will pay for it.
I have read some of the other reviews complaining about the dragon, as long as you stay out of the open and away from his tower he appears to leave you alone for the most part. but just that fear that settles in when hes coming after you is worth it every time.

Fairly In depth crafting system:
Me and my friend have only appeared to scratch the surface of it, but so far so good

Sense of Survival:
From the aspect of staying warm to starving to death, you do get that feeling like there is more than just monsters that threaten your life.

No gamebreaking bugs so far:
Yeah no bugs we have found so far have made the game unplayable.

Cons:

Sharp learning curve:
not sure if its a pro or a con, but the game is a little overwhelming at first if you are not very accustomed to survival games.

Not sure how well this game works solo:
As i stated i played this game with a friend, i can see the world and lack of inventory room at the begining very harsh for someone playing by themselves.

Conclusion:

Thumbs up!
It has enough going good for me to reccomend this game to others with what ive seen. It also has enough different with it to justify getting it with the large amount of survival games on the market at the moment. I would buy this game again just for the few experiences i have had with it. I look forward to seeing whats coming next from the devs. they seem to update this game pretty frequently.

At least 7/10 atm and will adjust as things change

My experience in Savage Lands:

Spawn in....

Craft an axe and hammer and chase down some pigs...

Chase my prey too far and gets cooked alive by a dragon...

Repawn...

Go to some small ruins and gets mauled by 3 skeletons...

Respawn again...

Take my time, build a crafting bench, and after a while of careful hunting, actually manage to obtain some armor....

Decide to pull a stupid move and head back to the ruins while it's still dark...

Sees the skeletons have metal armor and weapons...

Gets mauled by skeletons, again...

Respawn, again...

Has a friendly encounter with a pack of wolves located right at my spawnpoint....

Gets mauled by wolves...

Respawn....

Gets mauled by wolves...

Respawn....

Gets mauled by wolves...

Respawn....

Gets mauled by wolves...

11/10 Would get spawnkilled by wolves again...

Not a bad survival game. Got off the Humble Bundle. Well worth it so far.

This game seemed to have potential about 6 months ago when I first bought it with my friend. We got pretty far and it was fun. We decided to boot it up again and restart to check out all the new content. But for some reason you added a god damn super dragon that kills you every 5 minutes. We bled and cried and sweated our way to the next area through a portal after getting the key from lord kruul and thought we were rid of that accursed dragon, buy were we wrong. After dying about 10 more times from in an hour we were done and not happy. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING.

OH and be prepared to spend many hours mining because it is slow as balls.

I have had this game for over a year..Played it for a bit and then, it slipped into the list of forgotten games in my steam library...

UNTIL TODAY... A friend asked if i knew anything about this game and he bought it on the humble bundle.... so we dove into it and unfortunately his PC wasnt up to snuff and he couldnt play. but I dove deeper than before and had a blast....

the crafting takes a bit of getting used too but once you have it down pat, your all set to build up and go exploring...

8/10 (only because it still needs a bit of polishing...)

worth a buy especially with the gumble bundle deal

This game is one of the few that captures almost everything I want in a survival-style game. I don't really see why people say it's SO difficult though. It's not easy, but it won't kick your ♥♥♥ if you play conservatively and don't run around in your underwear swinging a hatchet at a dragon. Focus on survival, and you'll find a rewarding game filled with crafting, building and exploration.

Also deserving a special mention is the amount of work the devs continue to put into this game. There is a counter on the main menu telling you when the next update is coming... There have been a huge number of updates since I've owned this game. It's not perfect, there are still some rough edges but it's getting better every day.

This is a really tough review to write because I'm torn between saying Savage Lands is good/fun and it is "bad"/not fun.

After doing some reading I see that the primary issue my husband and I were trying to work around, namely food scarcity/no spawns, is a recently introduced bug that is already being looked at. However it really soured our introduction to the game and our play experience. We spent the day scrambling around desperately trying not to starve to death due to a technical glitch. That's not fun.

Conversely we did actually have a lot of fun. Cooperating and coordinating our efforts to survive, explore, and get our bearings was hilarious and entertaining. We even had a surprise adventure or two with some other players on the multiplayer public servers.

This game has a *lot* of potenial- and even though it seems to be trying to squander that potential it can't quite snuff out the promise of a good game. There is a lot of work that needs to be done- bugs to be squashed, performance issues to be hammered into shape, and for the love of God could I please get a female avatar so I can stop playing Trognara the homely crossdresser.

After really considering my feelings I have to give this game a "more positive than negative" thumbs up.

Hard to get into it and first 30 minutes are slow but after you get the tin tools and learn the game it becomes really fun.
8/10

The explosion of survival games in recent years has been fascinating to watch, because everyone has a different idea about what makes them appealing. There are some like Subnautica that go light on the survival elements to emphasize exploration and building in a vibrant world. Then there are others like The Long Dark that push you to learn and master the mechanics to survive in brutal conditions. Savage Lands appears to go in a third way, opposite the ones I just mentioned, and I'm not really sure that's the best direction to strike out in.

Savage Lands casts you as an outcast, sent to the frozen reaches of not-Skyrim presumably to die. You can customize your waxy, lumpy character with mohawks and tribal tattoos before embarking upon your exile, but harbor no illusions of making Goku or Kanye West with the handful of options present. Once you arrive in the arctic wasteland you're given a laundry list of survival tasks that act as a tutorial, directing you to chop wood, gather stones, and hunt animals. It doesn't actually tell you HOW to do these things or WHERE to find them, but I was able to puzzle them all out in fifteen minutes or so.

From there you're on your own. The landscape is helpfully dotted with ruins of shacks, cabins, and villages which you can repair with the right resources. This makes a good first goal once you find your footing, working your way up the extensive structure tree from workbenches to smelters in order to patch up your new home. In the meantime you'll have to attend to your survival, represented by two bisected gauges. The top one is health/temperature, restored with bandages and fire, and the bottom is stamina/hunger, restored by eating and not running around all willy-nilly. It's arranged in this way so that hunger and temperature can eat into your other resources if left unchecked, which becomes a major consideration in blizzards or on long treks.

As you scavenge across the land you'll find notes scattered about that give bits of lore or hints at how features like armor work. You'll also find quite a few points of interest like ruined forts and towers that usually contain some loose tools to appropriate. The other thing you'll find are monsters, and in no short supply. Your starting area is mostly populated with rabbits, deer, and the occasional brittle skeleton that needs to be smashed. Travel more than a hundred meters in any direction, though, and you'll have wolves tearing your throat out. Preparation is a must for longer journeys, as just one tough foe getting the drop on you can spell disaster. They won't give up once they spot you, either, a fact I was distressed to learn after leading a wolf back to my camp.

There's plenty more to be distressed about, too. Creatures in the world have some of the worst collision and hit detection I've ever seen, vibrating through rocks and walls and hitting you from a yard away. If you're not beating on monsters you'll probably be beating on mineral deposits, because mining is key to progression and takes a ridiculously long time to dig out anything more valuable than coal. Other resources like clay are bound to be a complete mystery unless you try literally everything or consult a wiki. And in a perfect example of how little quality-of-life there is here, a basic container to place in the world takes fairly advanced materials to make, meaning all your junk is going to be sitting in a pile in the snow for a few hours until you can finally craft a ♥♥♥♥ing wooden chest.

I would be more willing to stick out the rough gameplay if the game had some other appeal, but it really, really does not. You may have noticed that the screenshots on the store page have a lot of similar daytime scenes. That's because this is probably the grayest game I've ever played, and that's counting stuff like LIMBO. The world is almost completely devoid of color; the snowfields are gray, the foliage is brownish-gray, the stonework is blueish-gray, even the monsters are all grays and browns. There's not much detail to the models either, and the animations tend to be slower and stiffer than you'd expect.

There's certainly potential in Savage Lands, but it won't be realized without some major overhauls that probably aren't within the scope of the project. The visuals are a dreary mess and the progression is needlessly tedious and complicated. And even if you come to grips with that, you're likely to be eaten by a wolf or a dragon and spat out to the main menu. I get the appeal of open-world survival Skyrim but this is missing so many simple balance and accessibility elements that I don't know how you get there from here. If this game ever shapes up I'll revisit the frozen hells therein, but until then I have little interest in sticking it out.

This game may feel a bit clunky, or not interesting because of the looks, but it's a good game if you give it some time. It's nowhere as hard as some people say it is, or maybe I've been just lucky. Picked it up during Humble Bundle with a friend. It was fun playing.
I'd give it 7/10