The Haunted Hoard: Savage Halloween (Switch)

Halloween is the one day of the year where everyone agrees to celebrate horror, but it only seems fair those same creepy creatures and terrifying monsters featured in our decorations get to enjoy the day too. In Savage Halloween, every year the supernatural creatures come over to our world on All Hallow’s Eve to join in the party, but a certain dark lord DJ doesn’t want the party to end, the vampire sealing off the way home so everyone can continue to celebrate in the human world. A few of the monsters recognize that humans and monsters can’t peacefully share the same world though, these three heroes leaping into action to stop the monster takeover and send everyone back home in Savage Halloween.

In this sidescrolling action platformer the focus is on running and gunning down whatever creatures are blocking your path forward. Playable in either single-player or a co-op mode where you have to be pretty careful your partner doesn’t go off screen or they’ll lose a life for it, you get to pick from three heroes who all have their perks and downsides. James is a jack-o-lantern turned overall wearing gunman, the spooky farmer not having any huge perks or drawbacks compared to the villainous vampire’s daughter Dominika who augments the universal double jump ability by being able to hover in place with her wings for a while. However, she is more fragile than the werewolf Lulu whose greater durability is balanced by her taking a bit longer to kill enemies than the others. All three of them have the same default rapid-fire machine gun for handling foes with, but distinct special weapons include James’s pumpkin bombs that are thrown in an arc, Dominika’s multidirectional burst that heals her if it hits things, and Lulu’s forward reaching claw shot. While Dominika’s extra air mobility does give her a distinct edge over the others, levels and fights are usually laid out in such a way where you’re free to choose whichever Halloween hero you like, the stages not giving Dominika too many advantages with her extra ability.

What is more interesting than the three leads though are the new ammo types they can pick up during the adventure. Besides the special and default shots, there are four distinct ammo options that play different roles and mostly fit into the Halloween theme excellently. Since the game is already drawing some heavy inspiration from Contra in its platforming stage design with enemies you need to gun down, having a spread shot isn’t too much of a surprise, but rather than spraying bullets in a cone ahead it manifests as a group of bats flying outwards. This is definitely the most common secondary ammo type and pretty useful for most situations save where a foe might be sitting in small gaps between bats, but that doesn’t mean the other options are useless. The ghost shot will fire a spirit who will fly forward and back in a fairly large horizontal range, even going behind the player. The ghost shot can pass through walls and floors too, so it’s a great tool for getting enemies using the level as cover or it can be used to trap enemies who like to move around a lot such as most of the bosses. The toad shot won’t find as much utility, the shot sending out a large toad that will slide around on the ground briefly. This is a good attack type for when you’re heading down into an area filled with enemies so it does have a use case where it beats out the competition, but the chicken shot doesn’t really seem like it even has situational usefulness. The chicken shot embeds in an object or enemy and then eventually explodes, dealing far less damage than something that takes so long to activate should. Any trapping potential is exceeded by the ghost shot and even your basic shot could probably deal more damage in the time it takes to detonate, so it feels more like a joke option than a legitimate strategic tool.

The chicken shot is the only attack type in your arsenal that feels frivolous, all of them able to be fired in eight directions and while moving so mobility and targeting mix together fairly well. As you adventure through the game’s 7 large levels you’ll find a variety of situations asking for different shot types. Climbing up the interiors of trees in the spooky forest makes for tight spaces where the ghost shot or toads can get around your movement limitations, but areas populated heavily like the underwater sections might be better handled by liberal use of bat ammo. While the health of characters varies you do have a health bar that allows for a few hits as you explore the stages, and while you do have a set amount of lives, this ties more to your score and ammo count than how far you can get in the game. If you do get a Game Over, you can pop back in and start at the last major level, and while you’ll need to build up your ammo reserves in the stage, the basic gun does good work too so you’re never truly underpowered. Hardcore mode does take things a little far with its one hit kills, but you can select your last completed stage there as well so it serves more as a test of your level knowledge than some insurmountable challenge.

Savage Halloween’s stages come in many spooky flavors and never feels too restricted by the game’s Halloween theming. Sure you will head to an ice level with some evil Santas wielding miniguns, but it’s the domain of an ice witch and the dark colors, fire-spitting gargoyle heads, and abundant spikes still help it feel like it’s part of the same scary night as the other stages. The castle levels with the dungeon traps and giant spiders are more traditionally spooky while the Mesoamerican temple feels like a solid fit with that mysterious air of a lost civilization. Even within a stage the variation in how you’re exploring or facing enemies feels diverse yet appropriate, fights happening aboard a train, on a river raft, and underwater in stages otherwise focused on different settings. Unique and recontextualized enemies serve as appropriate foes for these special segments while they also play a strong role in making getting around a normal level more involved than firing forward and jumping over pits. They’re never placed in ways where it feels like it’s too difficult to get around them, but picking the right ammo and avoiding their simple attacks keeps things involved even if the general difficulty level never gets too high.

Perhaps the biggest changes to stages you’ll find though is where briefly you break away from the normal rules of the game to experience a different gameplay type. There is a segment where you’re flying around the air trying to handle enemies coming in from in front and behind, a segment based on the Battletoads’s Turbo Tunnel that is easier than its inspiration but still requires weaving around and jumping over barriers as your ride barrels forward on its own, and even a segment where you drive a car with mounted guns. Some of these deviations are closer to regular gameplay like the segment in the temple where you need to outrun a boulder while shooting the enemies who are trying to slow you down, but mostly these segments are interesting primarily for being novel. More attention was definitely put into making the regular platforming action substantial so a few of the gameplay shifts can almost feel like they’ll be pushed through without much thought or just slightly annoying for the health you’ll lose playing something relatively simple. The ones where your regular shooting mixes with the gimmick like the flying portion and boulder chase feel more at home since they carry over the ideas of enemies demanding different approaches, so overall it’s at least nifty to see the departures in design and many even work out fairly well.

The minibosses though are surprisingly underwhelming. While they might have a unique or cute concept like one based on the Robot Master fights from Mega Man or a quirky garlic-headed martial artist, their battles can end rather quickly due to your own fairly high power. The bosses do stick around much longer and have both the gravitas of a big battle with a tougher foe and more moves in their arsenal so you can’t get too complacent in your dodging. Some like the giant clown still have patterns that can be quickly sussed out but the necessary actions still must be performed with a good degree of skill, and much like seeing which monster, stage, or gimmick is next, it’s fun to see which familiar monster type will be an area’s boss and what unusual twist will be given to them to set them apart from what we’re familiar with.

THE VERDICT: Savage Halloween packs its homage to old action platformers with the rich aesthetics of the autumn holiday it’s based around, the run and gun gameplay engaging and made all the more enticing by it’s spooky theming. Some of its deviations from its core mechanics are more gimmick than challenge, but the regular gameplay gives you a good set of ammo types that spice up how you handle enemies and areas. Shifting up the placement of foes and the designs of the area you explore keep drawing out enough variation in the core shooting that it’s enjoyable to keep pushing forward to see what new monsters and environments will appear and how you’ll tackle them. Savage Halloween would be a good time even without its seasonal trappings, but developer 2ndBoss didn’t skimp on style or substance.

And so, I give Savage Halloween for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Besides the occasionally bumpy roads taken to explore ideas like the Turbo Tunnel tribute or the car driving segment, Savage Halloween brings a pretty solid all-around experience. Its usual experiments within the bounds of the action platformer design work out well, the player encouraged to think about which ammo type to use but things never slowing down too much as you swap to it and clear your way forward. Little secrets give you ammo, health, or extra lives for going off the beaten path while the main adventure’s course doesn’t settle onto any one idea for too long. You’ll definitely see some enemy reuse and reskinning to match the new levels, but rarely is it just to present the same challenges, some new obstacle or danger added to the mix alongside the familiar. Everything works pretty well within the bounds of the gameplay mechanics, but things like simplistic minibosses and diverging from that core design in parts does make it feel like Savage Halloween doesn’t achieve all it could have if it had kept building upon the utility of different ammo types. You’ll certainly remember a sudden car driving section or the big boss sprites, but diving a bit deeper into what the player is expected to do during the stages could help the game’s overall feel be the standout instead of leaning into attention-grabbing departures from the norm.

Savage Halloween is certainly a fun game to add to your list of Halloween games though, feeling almost like a spiritual cousin to Halloween Forever. Halloween Forever’s action platforming emphasized difficulty more than Savage Halloween but the better level designs are definitely found in this title. They could both certainly take a page from each other though and perhaps push themselves up to even more robust Halloween amusements by doing so. Neither is a bad pick for some fun on All Hallow’s Eve and Savage Halloween’s little breaks from the norm are inoffensive enough that you’ll still get a lot of enjoyment out of taking on the monsters of the night with your enjoyable set of spooky shot types.