Raven’s Cry

I wish I could tell you that I’ve had a decent time playing Raven’s Cry. I didn’t go into this with any expectations of it being a good game. Not even a fair game. I was just hoping for a game, period. Its heart seemed to be in the right place – a pirate-themed RPG in the style of Age of Pirates and Sea Dogs (both of those being other flawed, but charming, outings). No, the problem wasn’t the premise or even necessarily the design. The fatal flaw of Raven’s Cry lay entirely in execution.

You play as Christopher Raven, a generic pirate/asshole, as he stumbles from port to port on a meandering quest to track down his nemesis who is responsible for killing his entire family. Yup, it’s that kind of story. And honestly, that would have been fine, except that it was nearly impossible to follow the dialogue in order to understand what was going on and who was involved.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that even after a few patches, there are still over 110 lines of dialogue (if the patch notes are accurate, they may be under-representing) that remain unrecorded. So, you’ll be in the middle of a conversation and all of a sudden, you have to quickly read the subtitles because the guy you were just listening to fell mute.

But even that would be tolerable if the dialogue was…not even well written, but adequately written. I get it, English isn’t a first language for the developers. But unfortunately, that can’t be an excuse. When you’re making an RPG, where dialogue and story are one of the key points of development, and you want to sell your game in English-speaking countries (which is where most of the profits are to be had), how hard is it to contract out a native English speaker to run an editing pass over the text before recording it? Part of me wants to petition developer Reality Pump and say “Jesus, people! Next time let me know you’re making a game and I’ll help!” It’s just embarrassing how stilted, and sometimes completely nonsensical, the interactions are. Most of the time, it’s like the characters are having entirely different conversations, to themselves, rather than reacting to each other, like I’m watching a movie in my dreams where everything is struggling to make sense, but everyone is speaking in tongues.

Unfortunately, that same level of “we don’t know what we’re doing” carries over to every aspect of the gameplay, as well. Take, for instance, the combat. “Which combat? Land or sea?” you may ask. Both. But let’s start with the on-foot combat. Part of the problem here is that you have games from recent memory, such as Shadow of Mordor, or even more appropriately, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, which completely nail one-vs-many combat. So with those games fresh in my mind, trying to maneuver Chris around feels like I’m trying to play those games, but drunk and with broken fingers. Every input comes with its own bit of lag, and sometimes, I assume because there’s no animation for it, my inputs weren’t even recognized. I want to run up to an enemy and immediately block, but I can’t. Why? Because for some strange reason, I need to be completely still for a half-second before it will let me start blocking. Things like that imply, to me, that very little beta (or even final alpha) testing was done before the game launched.

The sea combat is, compared to everything else, not a complete disaster. Oh, it’s not good or fun, don’t get me wrong. But if I was on the development team, and my job was perfecting the sea combat module, I would be teasing my co-workers with, “I’ve only got another year’s worth of refinement before my side is done. You guys still don’t even have a workable prototype yet!” Naval battles play out in mostly-random encounters as you travel around the overworld map of the Caribbean. It’s your standard unfurl/strike sails to increase and decrease speed, navigate around the occasional shoal and line up your broadsides affair that we are all used to by now.

Of course, because this is Raven’s Cry, everything feels clunky and unfinished. There’s no way to really aim your guns; you just sort of eye-ball it and hope for the best, raising and lowering the angle of your cannons through trial and error. And then if you want to board the last remaining enemy ship, you can send your men over, covering them with gunners. To be honest, I almost never bothered with that, as it only makes sense to use grapeshot to wipe out the entire enemy crew before grappling over, thus winning the exchange outright. Although, it is a little strange when I finish wiping out the crew, the now massacred ship still sometimes gets away. Who the hell is piloting that ship? Ghosts? Hmm…maybe that’s the game they should have made instead.

I take back my initial comment about the design being okay. One area where I can’t believe they didn’t just steal the idea from the Age of Pirates games is in the quick-access of various town functions. Each city is actually pretty large, and thus, the various functions of said cities are spread out all over the place. The shipwright is usually on the docks, but almost never anywhere close to where you arrive. Then if you want to hit the tavern, that’s another three-minute run. And of course the merchant where you buy personal items is different than the merchant where you unload cargo, and they’re never near each other. What this amounts to is that coming home from a successful raid on a Spanish galleon entails at least 15 minutes of running around between the various merchants, buying, selling and repairing. Adding a quick-travel (or even a quick buy/sell/repair) function while in town is such a no-brainer that I’m baffled by its exclusion.

Lastly, the bugs. Oh dear sweet god, the bugs and the lack of polish. The lighting is always terrible (like some sort of depressing horror game from the N64 era), there’s a constant threat of getting stuck in the geometry for even the slightest attempt at exploration, and the framerate is almost always several tiers lower than it should be (my rig should have been blowing through this game at 80 frames per second and I was barely getting 25 in most towns). Also, I’m not going to lie; I didn’t get very far into the game. It’s not for lack of trying. I encountered broken quests, game-stopping bugs, and even corrupted save games. I had to restart four times, sometimes because a newly-released patch changed something important and sometimes because the game just didn’t want to let me keep playing. And no, try as I might, even after four times through the first couple of chapters, the dialogue never ended up making any more sense to me. At a certain point, I just had to accept that if the beginning was this flawed, how likely was it that the rest of the game was going to be any better? Not that it will ever actually be possible to play the rest of the game. Well, maybe after a few years of patching. If the company remains financially solvent that long.

I’ve gone on the forums and read the devs pleading with people to bear with them as they try to use Dixie cups to scoop water out of this sinking ship. It’s actually fairly heartbreaking, because you can tell these guys do care about their game. They outright blame their publisher for forcing them to release before it was ready, though that’s only one side of the story; they could have easily mismanaged the hell out of their team and the publisher had no choice but to cut its losses. No one enjoys when a game fails this spectacularly, especially when so many people would love to play a pirate RPG. Hell, this whole experience makes me want to boot up Age of Pirates 2 right now, simply because I thirst for that type of gameplay so much. Oh well, here’s hoping someone does this formula right eventually.

And seriously, Reality Pump. Let me know next time you’re trying to write dialogue. I’ll help out, if for no other reason than pity

Reviewed By: Brian Mardiney
Publisher: TopWare Interactive
Rating: 30%

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This review is based on a digital copy of Raven’s Cry for the PC provided by TopWare Interactive.

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