An ambitious, but ultimately disastrous experiment in combining the FPS and RTS genre
Mark Fujii
Gamers often complain about how repetitive and uninspired first-person shooters have grown over the years, and it’s not difficult to see why. In a genre that’s arguably been over saturated with cheap imitations of top-tier games like Call of Duty and Half-Life, it’s the rare shooter indeed that dares to break away from the tried and true conventions of the genre and experiment with something new.
Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger, developed by Atomic Motion and published by SouthPeak Interactive, is such a rarity. It strives to combine military first-person shooting with real-time strategy and create an innovative hybrid of the genres that gamers have seldom seen before.
On paper, the premise sounds incredibly promising. When actually executed, however, it quickly becomes clear that Raven Squad is a video game that really should have probably been canceled before the project ever really took off.
In Raven Squad, you play as two teams of mercenaries who crash land in the middle of the Amazon after a mission goes awry. What exactly you’re doing in the Amazon is never really explained, and while there’s some very vague mentioning of one member of the team trying to get to a card game in Vegas, that’s pretty much the extent of the game’s story.
Each team consists of three different members that are equipped with their own individual weapons. The first team, for instance, has a machine gunner, while the other has a guy armed with a sniper rifle.
The idea is to coordinate the two teams together and take advantage of each member’s unique armaments to gain an edge against the Amazonian soldiers. For example, you can lay down suppressing fire with one team while the other chucks in grenades and storms the place guns blazing.
Raven Squad handles most of the gun play through first-person view to give gamers more control of the action, but you can also switch to an overhead view also. Transitioning to the real-time strategy mode allows you scout ahead for enemy patrols or points of interest, and it also enables you to give specific instructions to both squads simultaneously.
Again, in theory, Raven Squad sounds like a promising game, but the laundry list of problems that Raven Squad suffers from is endless. The graphics are underwhelming and bland, the weapons don’t handle with any degree of authenticity, and the enemies are either borderline mentally handicapped or capable of shooting you in the face from a mile away. Your squad’s intelligence is comparable to the densest of rocks, mission objectives are usually vague, and there’s more bugs in Raven Squad than most insect collections.
You can, of course, decide to handle everything in RTS mode to avoid most of these issues. It’s fairly simple to just tell both groups to run around the map and engage one group of enemies after the other, but it’s incredibly boring as a gaming experience. Your team will pretty much dispatch any enemies they come across without you having to order any specific instructions, and if you do end up dying, it’s probably because the game’s path finding routinely sends your soldiers running blindingly into boulders, trees and other impassable barricades.
There’s almost no strategy involved if you choose to play Raven Squad exclusively in RTS mode. Weird as it sounds, you’ll probably enjoy the game more if you grit your teeth and just endure the myriad problems in Raven Squad by playing it as a shooter.
And then there’s the issue of the game’s audio. Most of the voice actors sound like they’re reading their lines from a poorly written script for the first time, and the rest have thick, quasi-stereotypical, ethnic accents that are just as atrocious. You’ll cringe and wince with every line of terrible dialogue in Raven Squad, and truth be told, it’s almost worth buying the game just to experience it. It’s really that awful.
Even if you can somehow endure Raven Squad’s absolutely broken gameplay, chances are you’ll be able to complete the story mode in less than ten hours. The game also has a cooperative mode that allows a fellow gamer to control the second team of mercenaries.
Surprisingly, Raven Squad is actually a little bit more tolerable this way. You can actually devise strategies while collaborating with a fellow human being. While this small bit of redemption hardly vindicates itself for all of Raven Squad’s other glaring flaws, it’s still worth noting if you and a friend happen to be unfortunate enough to pick the game up.
Final Verdict
Raven Squad is ambitious enough to try and experiment with the shooter, and that should be admired. However, with every risk comes the very real possibility of utter failure, and that’s what Raven Squad ultimately ends up being. The game tries to fuse RTS and FPS elements into one game, but it never bothers to get any part of those genres right.
The shooting is horrible, the strategy element of the game is horrible, and pretty much everything else about the game is so terrible that it makes me wonder what the developers were thinking when they decided Raven Squad should go gold.
Raven Squad does have a few redeeming values scattered here and there, but none of them are enough to warrant purchasing or even renting Raven Squad. Unless you feel like torturing yourself with the game’s ridiculously bad voice acting. That’s always worth a chuckle or two.
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