Raven Squad from SouthPeak Games turned out to be a hard game for me to review. The game combines real-time strategy elements from up above and shoot you in the face first-person shooter gameplay. I normally don’t go for the real-time strategy games and don’t have any in my collection. I typically lean towards more first-person shooter games. How do you review a game that does both while most other games out there do one or the other? How do you compare it? I will tell you after the jump as I suffer through Raven Squad on the 360 and lived to tell about it. Read on.
You can tell a lot about a game by it’s cover. For some reason the rules don’t seem to apply to video games the same way they do for books. Raven Squad has got bargain bin written all over the cover already. Its cover has got the stereotypical white dude holding a gun in camouflage face paint (check). He looks really pissed off too, like someone shoved a pineapple up his ass (check). This is the same look Steven Seagal has on the cover of all of his movies, and those suck too. Next on the cover is the lush green third world country jungle and flowing river combined with massive amounts of explosions (check). Gotta have explosions. Dolph Lundgren movies typically have ALL of these things, and yep-they suck too. See where I am going with this?
Raven Squad turned out to be an easy way to get gamer points and catch up on my friend’s gamerscores. Why do I say this? Because your friends aren’t going to buy this game. I played for about an hour of the single player missions and had racked up over 175 gamer points in that span of time. Easy money! The game is around 5 to 6 hours total in length (totally doable in one sitting) with every mission roughly getting you around 25G’s of gamerscore points. I blew through 4 or 5 missions in around an hour at 20 to 30 minutes apiece. I was trying to take in everything Raven Squad had to offer, and believe me it wasn’t much.
Raven Squad has got a laundry list of game errors, glitches, fail points, and downfalls. It’s almost too much to go over in my review. I would love to give a full review of this with all of my thoughts but my review would be over 5 pages long. I will say that the real-time strategy and first person parts of the game do in fact work. They honestly do, but with horrible enemy AI, not much strategy being involved, horrible voice acting and commentary, the game falls short with both. You just don’t want to keep playing. It’s almost like the people at SouthPeak had an idea and wanted to break into the market for dual gameplay types, then released a half-hearted attempt in Raven Squad. They stepped back after the game was released to let everyone know that it’s possible, just to see what other gaming studios could do with it. Now they can officially sit back and say, “Yeah, but we were first!” just like those annoying kids in random internet forums.
I might be a little harsh on the game, but then again, so is everyone else out there that has played Raven Squad and has seen what I have seen. With something so groundbreaking and fresh like combining RTS and FPS gameplay, you would think SouthPeak and Evolved Games would put a little more effort into making Raven Squad a better game. The game turns out to be a complete and utter failure. More development time, better voice acting, a more intriguing story, and a little more polish would have made Raven Squad playable for me. I will give Raven Squad 1 out of 5 ninja throwing stars. Not because it deserves it, but because I couldn’t stop laughing while I played this game. It’s laughable. I would give it no stars if I could, but it’s a game, people worked on it, and they get my single star for effort and participation. That is all. I will shut up now.
It’s a great concept, but a shame it wasn’t fully fleshed out.
how dare you say that about mr segal .you sir are a jackass!!