Raven Squad Review Page 2

18 Sep 2009 at 11:43:40 by Andy Alderson
Systems used to review this title: (360)

Unfortunately, the friendly AI is no better and this really becomes frustrating when playing from the RTS perspective.   While moving your team is easy (unless you encounter one of the aforementioned foot-high obstacles), when it comes to combat you’ll find it hard to believe that this is an elite military unit as they run about wildly, crying “they’re shooting at me” as if they were expecting a game of fucking Scrabble. They are utterly terrible at using cover and, like the enemy, their primary attack strategy is to run right up to the enemy, clearly not appreciating the primary benefit of ballistic weapons. You can’t simply ask them to stay where they are and shoot at the enemy, which is a huge oversight and one which all too often leads to you having to revive squadmate after squadmate thanks to their arse-brained tactics. The only other attacking option you have is to make use of your soldiers’ special abilities but, predictably, this doesn’t work well either.

This is largely because some of the special abilities are rubbish and you wonder how the soldier in question found himself specialising in that particular discipline. One guy’s speciality is the ability to throw a hand grenade. Now don’t snigger, it’s pretty tricky to pull off and you often find that Special Forces around the world are renowned for their grenade throwing programs. The leader of one of your teams, Shadow, is apparently a hot shot sniper but, when you ask him to use his special ability on the enemy, he will often leave cover and, you guessed it, run towards the enemy. A tactic which, I imagine, does not feature heavily on the curriculum at sniper school.  However, the worst aspect of the teammate AI by far is that they have an awful habit of leaving the team and running off on their own. We even witnessed a couple of occasions when a teammate would magically pass through a solid wall and find themselves trapped in an area no-one else in the team could reach, meaning that when they inevitably got shot we were unable to revive them. This kind of messy, half-arsed design unfortunately defines Raven Squad and this is most obvious in the game’s presentation.

While the game wouldn't look out of place on the last generation of consoles, the visuals are not actually the worst aspect of the presentation. That dubious honour goes to the absolutely hideous voice acting. To begin with you may find yourself chuckling at the sub-Arnie macho bullshit spouted by raven Squad leader Paladin, but once you’ve put a few (almost unbearably painful) hours into the game you’ll find that the dialogue and acting actually border on the insane. None moreso than your Asian guide Xian, whose voice veers so close to offensive stereotyping, that you’d swear the developer has spent a semester at the Bernard Manning School of Race Relations. At numerous points in the game she’ll warn you that enemies are heading your way and “they look like they ront to attach you!”

There are so many problems with the game that, sadly, a single review offers insufficient space to list them. And, for the sake of balance, we need to draw some positives from the Raven Squad experience. Having thought about this long and hard we can indeed confirm that character movement in RTS mode is quite quick, the way the camera moves from first-person to RTS mode is pretty good and the soundtrack to one of the levels sounds a bit like the incidental music in Commando. And we’re out. 

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