Oh those Norse gods, always making trouble for the mortals. Even the 2d side scrolling hack and slash world of Milkstone Studios’ Raventhorne isn’t safe from their meddling. There’s only one thing for a Norse dude to do: grab his hammer and sword, take off his shirt, and kill anything that dares to get in his way on the road to Asgard.
Gameplay
The game Raventhorne is a straight up hack and slash set in the side scrolling worlds of the Norse gods. The fallen warrior Raventhorne has awakened in the first of these worlds short a few memories, wielding weapons imbued with the power of the gods, and has been endowed with the mystical powers of the generic. I would love to say there is something shiny and new within the mechanics of the game, but there isn’t. You can light attack, heavy attack, block, jump, dash, and jump attack. As you can see these are all pretty run of the mill.
The first, and possibly only, breath of fresh air presents itself within the games spell system. Raventhorne is able to unleash his wrath in a few different forms when his spell bar is full. The actual manifestations of these spells have a couple different forms, but the way in which they are launched is somewhat botched. As the left shoulder button is pressed a menu pops up allowing you to select the desired spell. I say botched, because this process causes you to freeze in position while the monsters around you continue their assault.
In terms of combat, the game is somewhat unrewarding. The complexity is superficial as there are really only two enemy types with a handful of sub variations. You have the ability to string together a few attacks, which is almost always at your own peril as you have no ability to interrupt or juggle the enemies. The result is a lot of blocking and counter attacking in more or less the most mind numbing of ways imaginable. Don’t get me wrong you can fight in a way that makes you look like a bad ass, it’s just that you’re pretty likely to take a ton of damage while doing so.
On the bright side, the game has elements of character development. The system sort of works like this: Run through and kill whatever you can, die, and start the stage over. The funny part is you keep your experience, so if you get to a part you just can’t seem to beat, you can literally “grind” out a few levels until you can. I am still torn on whether this mechanic was a cheap way of reusing content to artificially lengthen the game or if it was a creative way to provide for dynamic difficulty based on player ability. If I were to apply Occam’s razor to this, I’m fairly confident the former would the simplest explanation.
Even with the somewhat tedious combat there is a certain amount of fun that remains in the game. When you forget efficiency and just start hacking and slashing, you do tend to enjoy yourself. It’s about this time you begin to feel like you’re ready to take on some big hideous Norse God Demon Boss… Too bad there aren’t any bosses in the game. Instead they thought it would be fine to just throw more of the same trash mobs at you all at once at the end of the two levels — yes, two levels.
So the game is short, the combat is unrefined, and there are no epic boss battles in the realm of the Norse gods. It’s about here that one begins to sense that business began to take precedence over development and the game ended up rushed. The result being something that feels more like a three dollar demo than a full game.
Story
The story of Raventhorne is that of a Norse warrior awakening in a strange land with amnesia — yep it’s that cliche. What’s that? Doesn’t every story have to start with a dead family? Good call, well that’s here too, and of course revenge is all that matters! The plot of the story is delivered through a series of encounters with the three Fates and an unidentified stranger whose motives are shrouded in mystery. All of the characters and settings of the game are centered around the Norse mythology with a pretty good attention to detail.
With regards to the setting, I found it to be a pretty refreshing to take a vacation from the more common high fantasy and science fiction settings that tend to prevail in today’s gaming world. Unfortunately, once you are beyond the setting and the borrowed names, the writing is pretty bad. Any sort of immersion you’ve got going can be crushed just one word into a sentence. For instance, what Viking warrior, says the word “Yeah?”, when the origin of that word is somewhere in the neighborhood of the turn of the century. Please note, I am referring to the 20th century, not the -20th century.
Unfortunately the game reveals itself at the end to be of the traditional episodic cliffhanger style. The part they screwed up on here though, was that there was really no big reveal. It was all so obvious and anticlimactic you could cut the tension in the room with an over boiled spaghetti noodle.
Audio/Visiual
Raventhorne is absolutely gorgeous. The work done by deviantART user animastur is nothing short of wonderful. The character animations and enemies are all highly detailed and exceptionally well animated. The art captures the feeling of the frigid and often gloomy Scandinavian region. The slashes across the screen and blood splat serve to enhance the combat experience and give you a sense of pulling off some pretty cool combat maneuvers, whether that happens to be the case or not. What all this adds up to is the notion that the developer and designers let the artist down by not raising their game up to the same level.
The music and sound effects live up to the quality of the art. They are really well done and only enhance the mood of the scenery. You can actually download or listen to the whole soundtrack for free, and I encourage you to do so, because it is really quite good.
Summary
Raventhorne wasn’t necessary a swing and a miss for the IGSU. I would even say it belongs in the lineup by sheer virtue of its art. However, I don’t think it was the game I would have spearheaded the releases with. The industry as a whole hasn’t yet seemed to fully realise a successful model for episodic style games, and I would say this is just another case of not getting it quite right. My impression is that this will be a game that demos really well but lets a lot of people down post purchase. All negatives considered, this game is only 240 Microsoft Points, and what you are definitely getting is a game worth that.
Update: Milkstone has released an update for Raventhorne. As these changes have changed the gameplay pretty dramatically I felt it was worth updating this review. I went back and played through some of the content and feel as though the combat has a signifigantly improved brawler feel to it. The increase in spell power generation was particularly game changing. All in all the game will still, if not even more so now, seem very short but will hate you measurably less. To address the length issue, which is why I think the game was made harder to begin with, they have added four difficulty modes and now that you actually enjoy the combat, the difficulty levels will probably see some use effectively doubling if not tripling the game experience.