The Savior’s Gang

Genre: Arcade / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

The Savior’s Gang is an odd title that’s difficult to describe. Picture a game like Pikmin where you control a horde of characters as a group, but instead of being a strategy game, it’s more of an obstacle course. Then picture the entire thing has a tongue-in-cheek religious theme, with the group being the followers of… god, I guess? And their journey unfolding as God and Jesus send taunting text messages at each other.

Yeah, really strange.

There are some elements of something really interesting here, but nothing that coalesces into a cohesive whole. The game’s story doesn’t seem to be introduced very well, and largely seems to be an excuse to have religious figures in absurd situations. Normally I’m all for that sort of thing, but here it just comes off as confusing.

The presentation is kinda’ a mess overall, too. This game takes up 2GB of memory, and I honestly have to wonder where all of that went, because it doesn’t look all that good. On top of this, as you move the humans around, they make various little comments, and they don’t really fit what you’d expect to hear from a band of rag-wearing medieval religious disciples. I strongly get the feeling that these are just stock sound clips tossed in haphazardly.

The same goes for much of the hazards you’re pushing your people through – everything from pit traps to buzz saws, and it’s not really clear who set up this deathtrap maze or why these people feel compelled to go through it beyond “get the holy grail at the end of the level”… again, it’s like the game’s creators had a vague idea what they wanted to do, and carelessly slapped it together.

As for the gameplay itself, it seems similarly slapped together. As far as I can tell, there’s no focal point the group of followers is centered around (no Olimar for the group’s Pikmin), and the individuals kinda’ scatter as they move around, with no good way to group them up. This means that you’ll inevitably lose a few of them when you try to push them through a narrow safe area or past a timed death trap. It’s frustrating, because it feels like something you can’t do much to avoid.

In the end, the Savior’s Gang has some interesting ideas knocking around in there, but as a whole, it’s just a mess, and it’s not fun to play. This game needed more time in development.

tl;dr – The Savior’s Gang is an odd title where you move a mass of people through a series of deathtraps and try to keep as many alive as possible, held loosely together by a tongue-in-cheek religious theme. Unfortunately, the entire thing doesn’t really come together well, it’s riddled with problems on a conceptual level, and it just isn’t fun to play.

Grade: D+

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