Game: Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Danger
Publisher/Developer: Evolved Games & South Peak Interactive / Atomic Motion
Genre: First-Person Shooter / Real-Time Strategy
Verdict: Interesting concept totally failed by lack of polish and terrible design
Pros: Good idea that sometimes comes together thanks to smooth transition between FPS and RTS modes
Cons: Lackluster visuals, impossibly bad voice acting, uninspired gameplay, and a wealth of glitches
Developer Acquired
My mum once said that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Actually that’s a complete lie, given that she hated proverbs. In fact, she never said anything remotely like that, but would I like to think that if she knew I would waste my adult life reviewing video games then she would have, because she would have known that eventually I would have to review a game like Raven Squad.
So, here’s something nice about Raven Squad. The concept of a squad-based first-person shooter that is paired with a real-time strategy interface, allowing players to approach the game as an FPS or as a simplistic RTS, is reasonable, even interesting, on paper. Players can transition at any time from the first person to the overhead perspective simply by pressing a face button, a transition that is as smooth as silk. Sometimes the concept is even executed effectively. The ability to use the RTS view to scan an area and then switch back into FPS mode with the knowledge required to take out unsuspecting enemies can be rewarding.
With the nice stuff out of the way, let’s get nasty. Raven Squad is a very bad game, for very many reasons, and you really shouldn’t play it. The primary of these many reasons is its presentation. The story sees the player take control of two mercenary squads who have been sent into the Amazonian jungle to save the day, rescue the girl, and other such bollocks. Unfortunately, they’ve found themselves in an special part of the Amazon that has never looked so dingy. Its dry, dull and underwhelming colors, not to mention structures, are regurgitated throughout the game’s environments, all with a distinct lack of details or shadowing. The icing on top is provided by unimpressive texture loading.
The most egregious offense is the character animation. Your squad will stand impassive from head to toe while they talk in cut scenes, making it look like someone’s superimposed a moving human mouth over a lifeless picture – classy. Further complicating matters are the procession of disastrous, albeit amusing, glitches. There’s nothing like seeing a guy crawling on air, or people dying while stuck inside of a wall. It may well be generous to say that Raven Squad visually resembles a mid-life PlayStation 2 game, and a poorly polished one at that.
All of the presentational deficiencies are compounded by the game’s woeful audio. Raven Squad’s producers emphasized pre-launch that their game offers a Tropic Thunder-esque take on 80s action movies, but the game’s direction is so basic and uninspired that none of this is conveyed. As such, its terrible voice acting does not come across as deliberate. That doesn’t stop it from being hilarious, mind you, but that hardly validates it.
A prime example of piss-poor voice acting is squad leader, Paladin, the game’s protagonist, who’s meant to be a hard-hitting mercenary type, desperate to get back to Vegas. What he sounds like is a half-assed, disillusioned loser, who’s desperate to return to his struggling late-night radio slot. Admittedly, his random inflections, or more pertinently the lack of them, make anything he says a guaranteed side-splitter. Then there’s Xian, the Chinese civilian who acts as your guide in later missions. Not only is she mostly incomprehensible, but her voice actress was clearly playing on some kind of Asian prostitute racial stereotype, except not very well. Even her saying, “look behind you,” becomes a garbled mess of ‘w’s and ‘h’s.
This is just one of many bizarre and likely offensive accents on offer, all to the backdrop of meager special effects that make minimal or odd-sounding noises. Examples of this include a giant gate being rammed open to mute, or the boom of explosions suddenly stopping mid-a-splode. In short, if it was ever perceived that the totally unfinished, unpolished product of old was now extinct in the blossoming, modern-day games industry, Raven Squad’s presentation absolutely proves otherwise. As if to sum it all up, the game even lacks a logo to display in the Game Library section of your Xbox 360 dashboard.
This would all be somewhat forgivable if the gameplay was up to scratch, but truthfully it’s not even close. Like I said before, at times the blend of RTS and FPS gameplay works, but sadly these moments are rare and fleeting. This is because both modes are plagued with fundamental design flaws.
FPS controls are mapped against the system’s norm, and therefore feel unintuitive. While the shooting mechanics are reasonable, it never excels beyond the generic in terms of weaponry and mode of fire. Level design is unimaginatively linear and filled to high heaven with invisible walls that defy all of the progress that the genre’s made in the last decade. Enemy AI is basic, seemingly constituting run-at-them-and-shoot-them, while squad mates AI isn’t much better. Alternating between the two squads you control feels more like micromanagement than fun, and having to revive as many as five fallen members can be a pain, especially during a boss fight featuring a barrage of grenades that makes this all but impossible.
On top of that, the RTS mode is simplistic to the point of being both boring and unnecessary. Sure, the controls are unwieldy, and scaling out is unaccommodatingly limited, but none of that really matters when squad mates usually perish in any RTS combat you pursue. All you can really do in the RTS mode includes: look around, move and shoot dudes. Except you can’t, ‘cos you’ll most likely die. As such, by the end of the game it begins to feel pointless. Of course, AI issues would be solved by playing online with someone in the available co-op mode, but since no one was playing the game when I went online, this wasn’t an option.
With so many generic shooters out there, Raven Squad does stick out as at least by trying to do something different. Maybe some players will be able to look past its many issues, simply because of the ambitious concept. In my case, I lost what little patience I had with Raven Squad during one of its many autosave moments. I call them that because they’re not brief, frame-stuttering autosaves that can annoy in some games, but big, random, pause-the-game-for-ten-seconds-while-you-stare-at-a-dinky-message-type autosaves. But that wasn’t even the kicker.
The game uses these moments as checkpoints, and after you’ve died during a mission, will restore you to the last checkpoint you reached, and with the identical health you had when you got there. During the second-to-last mission one of these autosaves occurred, literally at the moment my whole squad had been decimated by an ambush. Upon loading the autosave from the checkpoint, I found my whole squad was still dead. It was then that I understood why at least one merciful soul on the development team had implemented the mission restart function, but it was much too little too late.
Interesting concept or not, Raven Squad is a terrible, unpolished and tiresome video game, and should only be bought by mums who wish to warn their children about the perils involved in reviewing video games. Even then, that’s really mean…
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