In recent years, multiplayer first-person shooters have put more emphasis on team tactics--large-scale team games like Battlefield 1942, for example, reward a certain amount of coordination in securing key map points that makes them more than just frag-fests. But the next big step in this direction is Savage, a game that adds a true real-time strategy element to what's otherwise team-based shooter. Savage lets one player jump into a commander role to control worker units, build structures, gather resources, research weapons for other players, and suggest orders to the other players. As ambitious as this hybrid design sounds, judging from what we've been able to play of a beta version of the game, developer S2 Games seems to be on the right track.

There are several increasingly powerful classes to play as.

Savage's unusual design essentially brings together first-person shooters with traditional real-time strategy. When you choose to play as a commander, you'll play Savage from the typical top-down perspective you might expect from a real-time strategy game, but the other dozen or more players on a team will be running around a map in either a third-person or first-person viewpoint, one being more natural for melee weapons and the other for ranged. Savage will have a light character-building element reminiscent of Warcraft III or Counter-Strike in that soldier players will need to kill the neutral monsters that respawn at various locations around the map to earn gold and experience points. Of course, the neutral creatures can also serve as an early warning mechanism to help you detect opposing players trying to sneak up in the tall grasses of Savage's lush maps.

Money plays a critical role in how effective soldiers are. Any time you spawn into the game as a soldier or return to a base or outpost, an inventory selection screen pops up that lets you buy weapons, items, and character-class upgrades. The variety of upgrades available is entirely a product of the research selected and financed by the commander (much like in a traditional real-time strategy game), but soldiers have to manage their own funds to put those weapons into practice. The three main character classes come equipped with a free melee weapon, and it doesn't cost anything to grab the first level of any ranged weapon, though it doesn't come with much ammo. The ammo for more-powerful weapons costs a significant amount and character upgrades will cost you nearly all the maximum 10,000 gold you can carry at once, so you might not always want to immediately equip your character with the best money can buy.

Savage is set in a fantasy world, but technology is readily available. The three main human character classes appear as progressively bigger and more muscle-bound barbarian men. The nomad that you start out with is quick enough, but he has a very weak melee attack and just 250 hit points. The savage medium upgrade is a tough-looking warrior with twice the hit points and a much better sword attack that can take out many neutral creatures in one swipe. At the top of the food chain is the legionnaire, who has a slow but devastating attack and 1000 health points.

Buy a weapon and items with gold earned from killing either neutral monsters or opposing players.

At the start of the match, the only ranged weapon available for a nomad is the bow and arrow, which can be powerful enough when you hold down the mouse button to charge up the attack, pulling back the string to its fullest extent. But you'll quickly want to get your hands on the first-tier upgrade, the quick-firing crossbow, and hope that the commander will soon move down one of the three technology paths--magnetic, chemical, or energy--to get the bigger weapons along the second and third research tiers, such as the marksman's bow, the shotgun, the plasma rifle, the rocket launcher, and the flamethrower. Unlike most shooters, which tend to balance weapons by giving each a specific use, Savage's basic weapons are simply made obsolete by later discoveries, and poorly equipped players will have a tough time against adversaries who have saved up more gold or with commanders who have researched more options.