The Savage Frontier series is the most overlooked sub-series of the Goldbox games, and yet the first part of the series is probably the best intro game for any beginner trying to get into them. It has the epic scope of a longer campaign, while at the same time keeping difficulty pretty low. As far as the game goes, this is probably my biggest issue. It’s too easy at times.
In terms of difficulty, the best part is the start of the game, when your characters are under-leveled and you scrounge together every gold piece just to get some new weapons, a place to sleep or level up one of your chars. At 1000 gold pieces, this is by far the biggest investment, but once your characters reach level three or four, it pays off big time. At that point you can easily travel to other cities, hunt bigger prey and soon you’ll be swimming in gold and better weaponry.
Plot-wise its mostly a hunt-the-token structure, four magic statues in all cardinal directions and a few other McGuffins. The plot is pretty linear and if you don’t follow it precisely, some events won’t fire. But as the game is at the same time pretty open, this doesn’t matter as much. You might miss some plot piece here or there, but like in most of the Goldbox games, you can explore the world at your own leisure and all the big plot stuff will happen anyway.
Despite that a lot of the game is seen from a pseudo-3d perspective, the old blobber, step-by-step movement in a blocky world, it’s not a Wizardry-type game. The world consists of a world-map with some locations, but almost no dungeons. The few that are in there are quite small and pretty limited for aficionados of dungeon crawlers. This is a game almost entirely about tactical battles, city exploration (and you can see all city maps with one press of the button, so more about trying out all houses and streets) and following the main plot.
It’s great at what it does, but if you expect something more like a dungeon crawler, this isn’t it. Though most people going into it probably know what to expect from a Goldbox game.
Sadly, these days the Savage Frontier games are mostly forgotten. People who tackle the Goldbox games these days start most of the time with the Forgotten Realms tetralogy, once they’ve finished them they either stop or want a different setting, like the Krynn or the Buck Roger games. And if they manage to finish these, they usually have grown tired of the engine.
Which is a pity. While not developed in-house, Gateway to the Savage Frontier is a highly competent game. It’s a grand tour of the Savage Frontier that throws lots of cool stuff at you, countless locations, lots of different monsters, neat items and other treasure, and while the plot itself is pretty basic, you won’t mind this as it doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay.
It’s easy to get lost in it, to play one more city, do one more battle and realize you’ve played for hours on end. It’s by no means a great game (for whatever value of great), but it’s very good at many things and at its most basic, it’s plain fun to play.
The Entropy Pump 