Raven Squad | 360 Game Review

Amazing game play, sweet graphics, and great voice acting! Wait, no, actually that was a game I was hoping to review when I cracked open the copy of Raven Squad. Sadly I got the quite opposite from this title and let me say that I was really hoping for this painful experience to be done quick. Now after playing the game for a couple of hours and reading back on some reviews I read in the past I did my best to warm up to this game as much as I could. Truth be told, this didn’t happen. I can’t tell you how many times I had to leave and come back because level design and over all layout was so frustrating to grasp. I will be the first one to say a first person shooter and a real time strategy sounds like a great idea from the go. Developers Atomic Motion and publishers Evolved Games just don’t bring us the goods we had hoped to see.

After putting down the controller I was left with one word, choppy. The graphics are very poor. Now I know as this can be a very small aspect of the game depending on how it plays. Yet Raven Squad visuals aren’t anything to jump up and down about. It even reminds me of plenty of games I had played on the original Xbox and that just isn’t good for any gamer. We are experiencing plenty of games this last past year that have pushed the limits of the Xbox 360 and I honestly do hate when I have to review a game that doesn’t call me to it visually. The ripple effects in the water were almost average and explosions were pretty dull.

Switching back and forth through the tactical view you are able to move your squad around with a cursor.  This is where the RTS feel kicks in.  You can position your squads anywhere the map allows you to.  This works against Raven Squad because you are very limited to certain spots that would be awesome to use.  I can’t tell you how many areas like tree’s, wooden shacks, and water spots I wanted to use to my advantage but NEVER could.  Battles were so short I hardly found myself switching back to first person view.  Your squad has fairly good accuracy and can take out enemies before you even spot them and that isn’t to mention how short the fire fights were.  I found myself taking advantage of the tactical view so I would not have to switch back to first person.  First person mode plays very stiff, even teammates move around like robots and do not have any personality.  Control’s must be as user friendly as they can especially with a title such as this.  It calls for two different controller styles in one and it was not as easy to get use to as one might think.  I can imagine several people throwing there controllers against the floor or wall in complete frustration.  This can reflect the entire game in a negative way to any gamer.

Player models and voice overs are horrifying and complete torture.  Now before the game was coming to a release it was actually said that this game was meant to have horrible voice acting so it actually felt like an old cheesy action movie from the 80′s.  Even after knowing this it did not make the game feel or play any better.  I will admit it was hilarious hearing the bad accents and robotic dull voices but after a while it really feels like your playing a crappy game where bad voice acting was not intended.  This might have worked out for Raven Squad if the rest of the game was playable.  Plenty of titles in the past have actually had this work to there advantage because well…it’s all in good humor.  This was not the case for Raven Squad.

The sounds of the different shotgun’s, assault rifles, and sniper rifles each have a loud deep sound to them adding a bit of realism.  This is probably the only aspect of the game I actually enjoyed enough.  I am big on sound and I do feel it is a big part of the game.  Sadly I can’t say this helps the game in any matter since the game already has the annoying voice overs and does automatically save after every action scene.  There just isn’t enough good qualities or replay value to enjoy any detail the developers put there time into.  Movies are pretty consistent and happen before, after, even in between levels.  Each packed with action which can make you feel as if that should be the game you should be playing.

During multiplayer I was not surprised to find not many people playing.  Unless your able to capture a close friend of yours hostage and make his only way out to buy his own copy and play co-op with you than you are fresh out of luck.  In co-op mode you and a friend can play as the different soldiers in a squad or in certain levels, take control of your own squad(of 3 total in each) trying to complete different objectives.  So basically nothing to different from the original single player.

The most we can hope from developers Atomic Motion are that future titles deliver something something a bit more user friendly.  I know there are plenty of things all of us can point out that needed to be changed or trashed but hey, that is a start.  Even with it not being up to our expectations I still think that they did a good job by delivering a game with all the qualities and content they stated it would have.  Yet it still is up to the gamer to decide if it came together and is truly a fun game.  Raven Squad will get lost and probably forgotten by most with the holidays approaching and such.  If you still have whatever urge you have to play this, rent it. Hell, even steal it…well probably not that but you get the idea.  Read a bit more before you decide on either of those you might just save yourself some well earned money.

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