Ravaged Review

In one sentence: A huge, sprawling FPS that would be great played in a clan – but not so much by yourself.

At first, Ravaged practically yells ‘potential’ at you. It’s almost enough to dazzle you into forgetting that the competitive online shooter community is mostly sucked up into the two huge shooty titles that came out recently (And a staunch few of us are still absorbed by Borderlands 2). Unfortunately, shooters like this fall into an exclusively niche category, populated only by people too cheap or too tired of/daunted by the online market to bother competing in the mainstream titles.

If, like me, you’re pretty inexperienced when it comes to competitive gaming outside of the big titles, you’re going to hit the “quick match” button and wonder why you got dumped in a huge map with the one other chump who thought that’d be a good idea. This was fortuitous in one sense, because I got to see a whole other side of the game – the sheer size of the maps and the tension of the vehicular combat focus. I start running to the nearest blown-out structure, and out of virtually nowhere a quad bike roars towards me. I fire off a few rounds before spinning around and diving into the structure. The rider dismounts and charges into the building – I give him the slip through another exit and steal the quad bike out from under him, spinning it around and ramming it into him as he follows me back out, squashing him against the building.

Feeling remarkably smug I speed off into the distance into the open, lonely wasteland. He comes back again with a truck, turret mounted on the back ready for action – not accounting for the fact that you need another player to operate it, and our game is decidedly empty. We end up racing over dunes and skidding around buildings as he tries to ram me off of the quad bike, ending in me taking a dive and lobbing a grenade underneath his truck as he disembarks. Boom.

Long story short, our naiveté in expecting the game to deliver a full map like Halo 4 or Call of Duty ended up creating a bizarrely tense apocalyptic grudge match, and the game fully delivered on giving us the means to do so. It felt singularly cinematic for all its isolation, and a far cry from the chaos the game’s advertising capitalises upon. This might have been a one-off, and less patient/bored gamers might have quit long before then, but I enjoyed that first match in a way I hardly expected to.

For a one-on-one match up it was surprisingly intense – The look and feel of Ravaged makes every encounter seem desperate and rushed, and on more organised games where there are twenty or so other players speeding around it feels like death can come from any angle. You’ll struggle to come out on top here and advantages can swing around on the spin of a coin. In deathmatches it’s possible to forge temporary, albeit unspoken and volatile alliances to boost your score and operate the deadlier vehicles if you’re comfortable with knowing your gunner might drop a grenade and run off or your driver might send you hurtling off of a cliff once his bloodlust is satisfied.

It’s moments like this that make Ravaged so powerfully unique. It might not be packed with players and if you want to get the full experience you’re going to have to take your chances with a map run by two warring clans, but it’s easy enough to get into the pattern of playing it regularly with the strong core group of players.

There’s no campaign here – it’s purely online – so there’s only a tiny bit of story clinging to the edges. You can either play as the Resistance, a small band of freedom fighters who want to restore civilisation, or the Scavengers, a massive organisation of bandits hellbent on living life their own way. It would be interested to see some sort of single player variant introduced in time, or even just a co-operative arena (Ravaged feels completely perfect for a mode like Space Marine’s Exterminatus or Gears of War’s Horde).

The game is complemented by a respectable arsenal and a decent number of melee weapons including cleavers, bats, crowbars, knives and axes for up-close and personal killing (which you’ll find yourself doing surprisingly often across the game’s eight maps). Multiplayer brawling never felt so good.

Ravaged has all the foundations of a great game but it doesn’t have the thriving multiplayer community it needs to flourish like it could. There are a few things missing from the overall experience and an arena/co-operative mode could do wonders for its audience. You can kill a few happy hours with the game as it stands now, but with a little more content and a bigger online community, Ravaged could be pretty damn epic.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.