Raven Squad Review

The world economy has not recovered two years after the financial markets collapsed. While some countries – like the United States – have managed to float above the tsunami, other nations are drowning in unemployment, debt and a rash of violence. Somehow all of this relates to Raven Squad where you lead a group of troops through the Amazonian jungles killing guerrillas along the way. The gimmick? You can switch between First Person Shooter and Real-Time Strategy with the press of a button.

Your squad is led by a guy named Paladin with each member having their own unique abilities. You control two squads at once: an assault squad can storm the enemy and a tactical squad can take them out from a distance. The assault squad has heavy firepower, grenades and rockets to take out vehicles. The tactical squad focuses on sniping and stealth through both stun/smoke grenades. However, the enemy AI is a very mixed bag. Some enemies will almost immediately see you and fire when you come into their line of sight. Others won’t even notice you when you are standing right next to them.

Aside from the variety of unique qualities to each member (for which you can press any direction on the control pad to switch to them), the game also has the element where you can switch between RTS and FPS. Both of them are very basic in scope and difficulty. For the RTS portion of the game, you basically just point your cursor, press A to set a way-point and watching your guys shoot anything along the way. You can have them take cover, pick up ammo/health and heal other team players as well.

The FPS element of the game (for which you press Y to switch) is basically a simplified version of Ghost Recon. And no, not a cool Ghost Recon game. More like the bastardized PS2 Ghost Recon games. You can aim, zoom by clicking in on the analog stick, crouch and perform other basic shooter functions. Along the way you will want to make sure to collect from these specially marked ammo dumps since you only have a limited amount of ammunition for your character’s special ability.

Raven Squad can be played both offline in a single-player campaign and online through co-operative play (there’s also system link). There isn’t, however, any multi-player beyond co-op. This limits the game to several hours of firefights, but in all likelihood you will stop playing long before that. Achievement junkies may find the easy achievements to be worth finishing the campaign, but that’s about all that will keep you interested.

Even worse than the gameplay is the audio. Sometimes the audio doesn’t even match up with what is happening on the screen. You have some very generic jungle noises (monkeys, birds, etc.), as well as guns firing, helicopters and so on. You can tell that some of the voice actors are putting on fake accents (especially the guy that sounds like he’s trying to be Asian). The dialogue and story are worse than the voice acting though. You will find a better storyline written in a middle school English class than in Raven Squad. Here’s one of the many laughable lines from the game:

“Please, watch your shots! Those ruins are irreplaceable.”

“Good.”

The cut scenes actually look worse than gameplay. They kind of remind me of CG work from PC games in the 1990s with low quality and very grainy picture. That said, the game doesn’t look half bad from the RTS view and even in the FPS view the jungle looks decent with the lighting effects. The worst thing I can say about the graphics (aside from the cut scenes) is that the characters both move and talk funny. Sometimes they appear as if they are floating above the ground.

Raven Squad is not going to be the next blockbuster video game. While the developers were aiming for Predator meets Commando, the 1980s action vibe just gives way to uninspired gameplay and cheesy one-liners. The idea of switching between RTS and FPS is a good one. If the right developer comes along in the future, this formula could work pretty darn well – especially for consoles. Until then I would just suggest avoiding Raven Squad as this hybrid of the two is DOA.