Ravensword: The Fallen King is one of the most ambitious titles ever to hit the App Store. Inspired by the Elder Scrolls series, which contains some of the largest single-player RPGs ever made, Ravensword brings open-world 3D fantasy gaming to the iPhone. The result is a big, gorgeous game that's overly stripped-down in some respects, but vast enough to reward dedication and exploration. It's definitely not perfect, but when a developer aims this high and comes close to its goal, the result is still an impressive achievement.
At the start of the game, your character wakes up in the town of Aven with no idea who or where he is. By talking to the locals and working through the standard quests they ask of you, you'll piece together what's happening to the world and begin your larger quest to figure out who you are and what happened to the king, who vanished several years ago. The storyline is typical RPG stuff, and it's told in a competent - but not thrilling - way. The whole game should take around ten hours if you take on all of the side quests.
When you accept a quest, it's placed in a log, where you can view all of your quests and the steps required to complete them. The menu interface is easy to use and will immediately make sense to anyone who has played this type of game before. The basic controls are similarly user-friendly. There's a stick in the lower left-hand corner that controls forward, backward, and side-to-side movement, and you can drag anywhere on the rest of the screen to look around.
I could've sworn Luke Skywalker killed you...
Fighting uses a lock-on feature similar to the 3D Zelda games. Tap an enemy to highlight it, and your view will hold steady on the beast, leaving you free to approach, evade, and hack away at it. And hack away you will, as fighting in this game is mostly button mashing. Your two primary options for taking down bad guys are to stand at a distance and shoot arrows into them, or to go up close and stab. Either way, you'll end up tapping the attack button as fast as you can.
Many players will be let down by the use of magic in this game. You collect stones with magic abilities, but their effects are hardly apparent and they require costly recharges. Your character is a fighter plain and simple, so if you usually play RPGs as a mage or priest, beware.
Also unlike many other RPGs, you won't find any emphasis on loot-collecting or stat-building in Ravensword. Loot-wise, there are only a handful of weapons and two different sets of armor in the entire game. Quests will occasionally reward you with a new weapon, but you won't randomly stumble upon any weapons aside from the occasional dagger or club dropped by a low-level enemy. Also, none of the items in the game have stats, so you'll be hard pressed to figure out whether the mace or sword deals more damage. Your character has stats, but you don't get to custom-assign points to them when you level up - that's done for you automatically.
Smells like burning.
Another weak point in the game is the map. Because the game emphasizes exploration, we expected the map to show us exactly where we were in the game world. Unfortunately, the map only gives you a vague idea of your location. There's not even a compass to tell you which way you're facing. Also, quests will have you running all over the place, but you can only fast travel back to Aven, meaning you'll end up trudging over long distances to places you've already been.
But let's get back to the good, because there's a lot to love in Ravensword. The game world is very large, and you never have to travel far before you come across something interesting. This is extremely important in open-world RPGs, because it doesn't matter how big the game world is if no one wants to explore it. We had a blast just wandering around the varied environments, fighting polar bears on snowy peaks and lizardmen on the shores of lava streams.
The game saves your progress every time you close out of the app. The next time you boot it up, you return exactly where you left off, which is very useful. However, we might have liked a manual save feature that we could use before fighting bosses. The music is atmospheric and fits the mood of the game perfectly.
When it comes down to it, Ravensword is both blessed and cursed by its own ambition. Blessed, because it can easily go toe to toe with the best RPGs on the App Store. Cursed, because it attempts to give gamers a console-like experience, and it falls short of that goal. At any rate, we are glad to have this game in our pocket and enjoyed it from start to finish. Any gamer with an interest in Western RPGs should definitely pick it up. As far as steps in the right direction go, Ravensword is a big one.
18 Comments
Thanks for the review! The only I think you have gotten incorrect is: "Quests will occasionally reward you with a new weapon, but enemies never drop them, and random treasure chests don't contain them."
Usually when you look around a killed enemy, his weapon will be laying there on the ground. Sometimes they are hard to spot though.
Other than that, I have no dispute with the other things you pointed out. During development, this game got big really fast, and I had to make some agonizing choices about what made it in. This time I opted for exploration over RPG stat twiddling, but the players have made it known that they LIKE stat twiddling, so that's going to be a major push for our next release.
Anyway, thanks again for a fair, well written review.
Good point. After I got better weapons, I started ignoring the clubs and daggers some of the bad guys dropped, and that slipped my mind.
FYI: I corrected the sentence. Thanks for pointing that out.
I'm not fond of stat twiddling. I think it greatly detracts to the pick-up-and-play factor. But I may be in the minority.
I like a choice, which seems a good middle ground. So you pick a race and class, and as you level, the game suggests stat enhancements relevant and useful to the character and class.
But at the same time, the game should let you tweak and fidget with each and every stat and do even crazy stuff if you want.
I agree, I don't feel that stat twiddling is that useful. I really love this game for it's great open environments and entertaining quests. I think that the character dialog could be improved, it's not bad, but it doesn't allow you to get to know people or understand the map too well. I also feel the controls are a bit lacking. Overall though, I'd give this a 4 out of 4, it's not perfect, but it's really great and nothing really compares.
Very good RPG. And yeah, a map would be very useful. Other than that, this is an amazing game.
Anyone know how well this runs on the First-Gen iPod Touch?
I heard on a podcast that it does run okay on first-gens. In the options, you can toggle off shadows and foliage, which I'm sure helps.
I bought the game for first gen and it runs pretty nicely. With shadows off it's very playable, but the frame rate in the city can be pretty bad. In the forest it's very nice and I don't feel that the somewhat low frame rate in the city is that distracting from game play. If you own a first gen iPod or iPhone/iPhone 3g, I wouldn't let performance prevent you from buying this game, it's very tolerable and this game is excellent.
Thanks.
Not sure if this is possible but I would love another "move" joypad style thing where the attack button is to control the camera, and tap on it to attack, It just doesnt feel natural to stretch my thumb up to scroll the camera around.. superb game mind!!
Alternate control schemes are under consideration for the next episode... depends on how far we get. Character customization, skill tree, and stats tweaking are what we've been hearing about the most, so they'll get priority. If we end up making enough money, I can hire some help and we'll get much farther. No promises though!
While I found the 3D environment reasonably rich and impressive, the models for the beasts were underwhelming, especially the first 2 enemies, the rat and the goblin were very basic, low-poly models, similar to N64 graphics, and frankly looked very amateurishly designed.
Also, I don't know it if was just me but I found the camera very shaky and unstable, and as a result, it's very hard to control the character. I tried different sensitivities and it just doesn't seem to work well. It's either too sluggish and unresponsive or way too twitchy and unstable. Some sort of motion damping would be nice. The twitchy camera view gave me a headache after a few minutes.
I really want to like this game but with the control system the way it is I just found it totally unplayable.
I didn't notice any shaky or unstable camera when I played. I did turn the sensitivity all the way up so I could control the camera with shorter swipes.
I just found the camera to be erratic and hard to control. Perhaps it should somehow be locked to a perspective with relation to the character. I guess I'm used to playing PS3 or Xbox games where camera control is very smooth, more intuitive and just 'feels right'. Maybe I'm playing Demon's Souls too much, but in games like that the camera and character control is so natural that you don't notice it and the game becomes truly immersive. Ravensword just doesn't do that for me - granted that it's an iPhone game - but even Dungeon Hunter had more polished graphics and control system.
"next episode"
Does that mean expansion to the game already releseased or does that mean Ravensword 2? Will the new features be available to those of us that have not played the game yet - ie: from the beginning of the game? Or will the player need to progress to a certain point to take advantage of updated material?
I really want to buy this game but want to wait for an update/expansion first.
tim
This was the first RPG I downloaded - the day i got my iPod touch - and to be honest, I deleted it a few days after and haven't really been fussed to give it another try, it had good concepts but it is badly put together.
I may give it another shot, maybe i can stick with it longer than an hour or half.
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