In Savage Empire, the bomb you throw at dinosaurs starts with clay you dig yourself

The recycled Ultima VI engine rewards players who like to figure things out alone — and leaves everyone else lost in the jungle without a map, a complaint reviewers have echoed from 2013 to 2025.

The gunpowder you mix in the jungle mud

To make a homemade bomb in Savage Empire, you have to head to the river for clay and shape a pot at the pottery in one of the villages, weave cloth from wool with the right equipment, track down saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal from burnt wood, and only then pack the gunpowder into the pot and wrap the strips of cloth around it before lighting the fuse. The recipe is laid out in a review posted the day the game arrived in the store, June 18, 2012.

A prehistoric fantasy adventure: the Avatar is carried to Eodon by a moonstone and finds a world split between native tribes and the Myrmidex, a race of giant ants that threatens all of them alike. To unite the tribes against the common enemy, he counts on professor Rafkin, reporter Jimmy Malone and the jungle princess Aiela, and learns shamanic spells to face ferocious dinosaurs and crazed priests.

The game reuses, with modifications, the same engine as Ultima VI: familiar to anyone who has played the series, but designed just as much as an entry point for newcomers who have never touched an Ultima. Conversations with the people of Eodon are typed in by keyword, and combat plays out in turns. It was developed by Origin Systems and distributed by Electronic Arts, and the title reached the GOG store on June 18, 2012.

They came for the nostalgia and stayed for the chemistry

Among those who wrote on the very day the game showed up in the store, June 18, 2012, one bit of praise keeps coming back: the dated graphics count for little next to the atmosphere and the story the game builds. One of them says they still keep the original box, saved on floppy disks there is no longer any way to run, and describes rediscovering the game in the store as recovering a present lost at the back of a closet.

A review from July 19, 2015 picks a very concrete example: you mention a dinosaur in passing, minutes earlier, and later, when asked, the game recognizes the word on its own, with no need to pick a ready-made question from a menu. Another, from July 26, 2021, recalls that the hand-made grenades — the same logic as the gunpowder in the clay pot — saved the character from the Myrmidex more than once.

A separate review, from March 13, 2019, shifts tone in the middle of the praise: the writer remembers dreaming the solution to a puzzle that had them stuck for days, decades ago, and admits that without an in-game map, crossing the empty plateau ate up far more time than they would have liked.

Lost on the plateau, no map and no manual

The oldest complaint is technical: in a review from June 19, 2013, a player warns that the copy then available in the store was an outdated version of the game. Years later, on November 28, 2024, someone else reports a broken dialogue right in the opening conversation with the character Tristia.

The complaint that comes up most often, though, is direction: you pick up an artifact in one of the great cities, try to get back to the teleport circle and cannot find the way, ask the locals and keep running into the same evasive answer. That is how, on March 16, 2024, one player described giving up after getting lost in the jungle again and again. On October 4, 2025, the frustration hardens into a verdict: the game, according to this person, is impossible to play without the extra documentation that originally came in the box, and that the store does not include.

Not even series veterans agree across the board: a self-confessed fan of an earlier Ultima writes, on February 23, 2024, that he could never get used to the reduced line of sight inherited from the Ultima VI engine, and that the shallow magic and near-total absence of random encounters make the pace drag. Two reviews in Spanish run along similar lines: one, from October 2, 2020, admits to being too young for the old mechanics but spares the premise and the art from the criticism; the other, from August 16, 2025, recommends spending your time elsewhere, finding the game repetitive next to the earlier Ultimas, even while granting that giving it a try costs nothing.

For players with the patience to take notes on paper

The game charges for all that freedom in attention: with no destination marker, it falls to the player to jot down clues, remember keywords and accept that they will get lost before they understand the map. It is the same engine that drew in players who already knew Ultima and, according to the store's own description, was meant to double as a first door into the series for those who never came near it — but the patience it asks for is the same for both groups. Players who like to investigate on their own, to try combinations until they hit the right formula, will find a generous jungle here. Those who expect a destination marker, a quest summary or any prompt on screen give up at the very point where the 2024 and 2025 reviews gave up: lost, no map, no manual. The gunpowder you mix yourself; the way back out of the jungle, the game makes no promise to show you.