WR: Raven Squad (Xbox 360, PC)

September 19th, 2009 by

raven-squad

Developer: Atomic Motion
Publisher: Evolved Games
Genre: FPS
Players: 1, 2 (online)
Console: Xbox360, PC
ESRB Rating: T (Teen)
Hours Played: 15
Progress: Finished game on Normal

In the jungle no one can hear you scream… and scream you will while playing this travesty of game. Raven Squad is a squad-based first person shooter with, what little-known Hungarian developer Atomic Motion would have you believe, are RTS (Real Time Strategy) elements. Read on for a stringent lecture on what not to do when designing a game…

Raven Squad consists of a group of mercenaries who get dropped in an Amazonian jungle to round up some drug dealers.  While on the mission however, things take a turn for the unexpected and the team runs afoul with a warlord named Juarez and gets stranded in the jungle. With the help of a female Asian prisoner named Xiang, you attempt to fight your way out of the jungle while trying to fend off Juarez’ forces. That’s about as far as I can get without feeling the undeniable urge to fume about how poorly written the story is: before the start of each mission (level) during the loading screen, we get a narrative which not only has terrible voice acting (more on that under “sound”), but is written in such an amateurish fashion that you’ll be prompted to role your eyes and sigh out loud at every opportunity you get. Once the level has loaded, a cut scene sets the stage for one of the game’s twelve frustrating levels. These cut scenes further flush out Raven Squad’s poor presentation elements, not to mention the game’s crude graphics and laughable dialogue. In summary… you won’t be playing this game for it’s story… actually you shouldn’t be playing it at all.

We’ve seen some games that visually pull off jungle environments very well, like Far Cry, Crysis, and Uncharted. Atomic Motion, however, thought it wise to ignore such shining examples of graphical fidelity and instead present us with simplistic, blocky-polygon models and basic textures. You’d think the game would at least run adequately considering the simple environments it’s rendering. Unfortunately this is not the case, model and texture pop-in is rampant, even at short distances, and character animation, especially facial animation, is non-existent. When characters speak, all that moves is the mouth, eyes and facial muscles are locked into place. Nothing in the environment moves or feels alive, everything is static: trees and bushes hardly seem to sway, there are almost no ambient effects and nothing is interactive, buildings can never be entered and are nothing more than cube-like outer shells. What probably makes the game feel more primitive than anything else is the fact that the bodies of downed enemies don’t remain where they fell, but instead sink into the ground only to disappear… I don’t remember seeing that happen since GoldenEye on the N64.

Oh boy, if you’re going to hear anything about Raven Squad, it’ll probably involve the game’s voice acting; it’s without a doubt the worst effort I’ve ever heard in a video game. The actor doing the voice for the game’s main character, Paladin, makes it seem so obvious he’s reading his lines, that you’d almost forget about the laughable dialogue.  Seriously, Grindhouse movies have nothing on Raven Squad when it comes to corny one-liners and the senseless use of profanity. The worst culprit by far in this clique of criminally bad voice actors is the one responsible for Xiang. Instead of having an Asian accent, as the character of Xiang is obviously from China or one of its neighbours, the Hungarian developers seemingly tossed one of their girlfriends a bone by putting her in the game. A thick, Eastern European accent covers appallingly bad English pronunciation in such a way that people who were in the same room as I while playing the game begged me to turn it off, sometimes (only half-jokingly) followed by threats of violence. Raven Squad’s music fits the jungle setting and action sequences, but go nowhere near making up for the terrible voice acting.  A very limited range of sound effects rounds off this very poor audio package.

Raven Squad annoyingly combines control schemes from several different popular FPS games, never quite making the controls feel intuitive or natural. Pressing the right thumbstick enables zoom, the left one makes your character crouch (you can’t go prone), left trigger makes you run, left bumper calls your other squad to your location, right trigger is fire, right bumper is reload, the “A” button toggles between weapons, the D-pad allows you to select squad members and the “Y” button toggles views. There’s a different set of controls for RTS mode, where you’re granted a top down view of the map: the D-pad still allows you to choose squad members or toggle squads while the “A” button confirms commands, “B” button cancels them and the left trigger enables skill commands (basically the use of secondary weapons).

The concept of combining RTS elements with a FPS game sounds promising, unfortunately the execution in Raven Squad is poor, completely depleting the potential of this idea.  At your control are two 3-member squads, one geared towards assault with machine guns and grenades, while the other is more “stealthy” with sniper rifles, flash bangs and smoke grenades. Toggling to RTS mode gives a good overview of the map, showing you the layout of the area and where threats are located. Sending one of your squads to do your bidding, however most often leads to disaster as squad AI is very poor. More often than not your squad will be mowed down by the enemy, requiring you to rush halfway across the map to resuscitate them before a counter indicates death, forcing you to replay the level. There really are no sophisticated commands to speak off, severely diminishing the “tactical” element of the game. The FPS controls are twitchy, making aiming accurately very difficult. Once you do have an enemy in your sights, bullets often pass right through them adding to the frustration and forcing you to take unnecessary return fire. Speaking of return fire, it is impossible to sneak up on enemies, as soon as you are within a straight line with them, even with the enemies’ backs turned, they will lock on to you and rain down gunfire, making me question what the point even is to being “stealthy”. With unresponsive shooting controls, poor squad AI and non-existent tactical elements, there really isn’t much here in terms of satisfying gameplay.

In theory, partnering up with an online player who controls the other squad makes sense, you no longer have to rely on inept squad AI to help you out, but instead have a human partner to intelligently assist you in completing objectives. Most levels, however, don’t have usable branching paths, so sneaking up on the enemy to take them down with a well-coordinated pincer attack often isn’t possible and even if it was… good luck finding someone online to play this with, most people were sensible enough to avoid this game and this hopefully includes all of your friends.

Will you have fun playing this game? Well you’ll be laughing at the terrible voice acting for the first 15 minutes or so… after that it’ll start grating on you to the point where you’ll experience violence-inducing seizures.

We have to at least commend Atomic Motion for trying to mix up the FPS genre a bit, but then we have to sternly reprimand this developer for letting one of their girlfriends, with a very thin grasp of the English language, do the voice for one of the game’s main characters. Shooter dynamics are very shaky, RTS elements are non-existent, and graphics are primitive and glitchy. There isn’t much here so don’t come looking… now send your love to the Usagi for taking the bullet for playing this one so you don’t have to.

Story:

+ Nope….

– Laughable dialogue, totally uninteresting story

Graphics:

+ The water looks OK….

– Terrible pop-in

– Hardly any character animation

– Basic polygon models, poor textures

Sound:

+ Okay-ish music, nothing you haven’t heard before though

– Worst voice acting EVER!

Gameplay:

– Shaky FPS controls

– Non-existent RTS elements

– Poor squad AI

Multiplayer:

+ A human squad-mate is bound to be more intelligent than the AI controlled ones…

– …good luck finding one

Usagi Factor:

+ Unintentionally funny

– Totally not entertaining the way you’d need a game to be