RAVEN SQUAD a SouthPeak Games title

**KENT HAMMER** Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:24 pm

Raven Squad: Operation Hidden Dagger
A South Peak Games title

Its not often in these days of next gen titles that any game manages to bring something new to the table, but that is exactly what Evolved games has managed here.

You see Raven Squad is both an FPS and a RTS all lovingly rolled into one budget release. Now you can't say fairer than that in these days of credit crunching and the need to stay at home to get your kicks.

The action is set in the Amazonian jungle in the year 2011, your plane crash lands and this is where the fun begins and the bullets start to fly!

You start the game controlling one squad of three soldiers, the leader Paladin and his amigos Oso and Thor. Their first objective is to fight through the jungle to locate their support squad consisting of Shadow, Flash and Zombie.

Straight away enemy troops appear and you shoot them down in standard fps style.
But now is where the constant choice and decision making comes into its own. Do you elect to blast through the game in standard FPS mode or do you stick to the standard RTS top down view to dispatch all in your path?

Personally I found that a careful balance between the two worked best for me at the start, but by the end of the 12 missions I did often find myself using RTS mode more and more as it meant you could always see what dangers lie ahead of you.

Some missions required you to navigate through jungle ruins of old civilisations and others through dense fields with high hedges.
My favourites were the village rescue missions or another one where you had to defend a general against an ever growing army of baddies that just kept coming and coming at you while you switched between your two squads desperately trying to hang on for dear life.

You switch between FPS and RTS mode seamlessly by simply pressing the Y button on your control pad and the camera would then either pan out above the jungle canopy or zoom in to see what our hero can see.
To switch between your members within your squad you press either left or right on the D-pad and then push up to return to the squad leader again.
Pushing down on the D-pad switches immediately to your other squad of three. This becomes crucial as at some points in the game your whole squad will get downed by the enemy at once and you will have to quickly switch squads to run over and administer a health injection to save them. This sounds easy but there is a time limit and the clock is ticking down the whole time putting the pressure on you.

Some of the later missions are very intense as the enemy will just keep re-spawning over and over until you manage to reach the next checkpoint or complete a certain task.

RAVEN SQUAD a SouthPeak Games title Raven_squad_screen_03

Now onto the multiplayer co-op campaign, this is basically the same set of missions as the single player but this time of course you get to control one squad each!
The main difference myself and a good friend of mine found was that it was easier to both just play in FPS mode. Although we did get ourselves in a huge pickle on the last mission of the game and I was literally begging him to use RTS mode so he could see where the hell the enemies were coming from and where our next objective was in this very twisting and turning jungle stage.
I kept getting way ahead of his squad then getting taken out by a bazooka and screaming in his ear “man down! Man down! Quick run run run run run” oh the joys of xbox live, good job he knows me only too well by now and how passionate I can get when the proverbial hits the fan! Well how could it be my fault? Ha ha

If you hadn't worked it out already this games characters and voice acting is cheese city central USA. Some of the dialogue is amusing and the main character made me laugh once or twice especially when he announces in one scene that we all need a piss after a long drive before saving anyone!

The worst voice over is the woman that gives you all your orders, she is meant to be Chinese but its almost like someone pretending to be Chinese and it seriously grates and was the thing I disliked the most about the game. When playing co-op we were even discussing if we could try and kill her off and muddle on alone, smegging awful!

That said I did enjoy playing through the game and it has a nice set of relatively easy achievements that keep popping up along the way. The graphics are not the best either but you have to remember its a budget title and that's why its more last gen.
I personally liked the new RTS/FPS blend and would be interested to see if there will be a Raven Squad 2 with some true next gen polish.

Overall I will give it a fun but flawed 5 out of 10

garymason72 Wed Sep 23, 2009 11:40 pm

Nice review mate, i can tell you all Kent certainly went through a vast spectrum of emotions while playing, any game which evokes such a reaction has to have something about it.

Guest Thu Sep 24, 2009 11:44 am

Well done mate, nice review.

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RAVEN SQUAD a SouthPeak Games title

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