Walking with Beasts: Operation Salvage

Walking With Beasts: Operation Salvage is a single player edutainment game based on two of the BBC's popular 'Walking With Beasts' television series.

By 2026 mankind has discovered time travel and has set up the World Wildlife Bionetwork (WWB) to travel back in time and study the animals of Earth's past. The player takes the role of an agent assigned to a department of this project that is studying the plants and creatures of the Cenozoic age. However all is not well with the project. The previously assigned project co-ordinator, agent Vega, travelled back in time but has ceased to communicate with the project. It is feared that not only has time travel somehow affected her judgement but that she is now working for another organisation and is trapping creatures for some unknown purpose and is putting the world's timeline in jeopardy. The WWB has therefore banned any personal time travel, all activities are to be carried out via a remotely controlled vehicle, the Explorer. It is the players job to control this vehicle through twelve missions, two for each geological period within the Cenozoic age. Their objectives are to place cameras so that the creatures can be monitored, release any trapped animals, and destroy any technology that should not be there.

At the start of each mission there's a briefing screen. The player then equips the river with whatever guns, cameras and other equipment they need and then initiates the mission. The game is played by a combination of keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is used to steer the Explorer, fire the guns, and to select items to be placed. The mouse is used to position items such as cameras and explosives and to load equipment into the Explorer.

Missions involve placing cameras in specific locations to monitor the creatures, identifying new creatures and adding them into the database, and destroying enemy equipment. There are three levels of difficulty, in the easiest level its enough just to capture a beast on video, in the hardest level the player must capture a beast performing a specific action. As the game progresses and the cameras are placed the player is told that, for example, 'Camera One has a 76% chance of a successful shot'. The player then selects that camera which starts to record, if it successfully records the appropriate scene then that's an objective that's been achieved. If it does not then it will need replacing. In some cases it is necessary to place a meal of meat or vegetation near a camera to encourage the right creatures into the area.

The player scores points as they progress through the game and there is a high score table that holds the top ten scores. There is also a save game feature that is offered at the end of each level.