Simply gazing at its gorgeous vistas and gazing up at its dangerous monster designs was enough to sell an inquisitive dungeon diver like me in Ravenbound. But as much as that first impression made me fall in love with his 3D roguelike game, the bird was shunted far off course by turbulence shortly after its flight. What started out as a promising action game eventually flew against a torrent of obscure and regressive systems, frustratingly uncontrollable flurries of loot randomness, and a whirlwind of extremely annoying bugs. bottom.
As Raven, a weapon crafted by the old imprisoned gods of the world of Ávalt, each new run possesses a randomly generated character called a ship. All ships have different combinations of almost mundane traits, weapon specializations, and even racial bonuses, but they all soar as magical birds, absorbing power from enemies they defeat in combat. Inherit unique, permanent abilities. collect items as part of The traitorous god who destroyed this world.
Combat isn’t complicated, but it’s fun. Each of the five types of weapons has its own characteristics that you’ll notice as you play a lot, but I wish they were explained more clearly from the start. The wide swing of the sword makes it ideal for clearing out crowds. With only a few combos each, you’ll need to master a satisfying dodge and parry system to successfully hack and slash. Both give powerful combat buffs when done correctly. In addition to helping you dodge damage, a well-timed dodge puts you in a frenzied state that greatly increases your attack speed, and a perfect parry can knock down enemies. The rewards for mastering these techniques are well worth the risk and are essential for defeating late-game enemies and bosses.
That said, there’s a lot that feels insensitive about the systems that work with combat. Keywords related to buffs, debuffs, and abilities can be simple, such as making enemies stagger or bleed, while others are less obvious and may not be defined in the Codex. Even after it took him over 15 hours to clear the main story for the first time, I still don’t know what multi-strikes are or what the luck stat does. Least abundant, enemies of all shapes and sizes, including tiny goblin-like soldiers, giant ogres, and sly tree spirits, come in both standard and elite forms. Elites have modifiers that are indicated in titles such as Juggernaut and Crusher, but again, it’s not very clear what the differences are between them. , a staple of the soul-like genre, but there’s a fine line between testing your mettle against a mysterious foe and encouraging you to reach “a ha!” It’s frustratingly opaque with moments when Ravenbound can’t walk well.
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The Warden bosses at the end of each region are a tough test of item builds and endurance as they attack relentlessly in long combos with very little room to counterattack. They all come in the same format, but he of the available weapon types is a knight who wields one, each a desperate back-and-forth battle. These challenges could be fun if you weren’t plagued by some of Ravenbound’s most detrimental bugs, like not tracking boss health accurately. The life bar frequently freezes in place, and the damage may not be visible after a few hits, even if the number is recorded with strikes. It is impossible to grasp the
This is just one of many bugs plaguing Ravenbound. Audio tracks overlap each other or are cut off completely. NPCs and shopkeepers sometimes disappear. Autosave was diligent enough that I didn’t lose progress because of it, but it did cause about 6 crashes. None of these are game-breaking issues, but their sum drags on moments you might otherwise enjoy.
loaded deck
Ravenbound may be a roguelike with a card-based progression system, but it’s not a deck-builder like Slay the Spire. Instead, it uses collectible card game motifs to house otherwise familiar systems in hit-and-miss fashion. Anything that can potentially be found or earned during a particular run is a card in a “deck”. It can be armor suits that make enemies bleed when they hit you, or buffs that increase the attack power of your weapons. Each time he wins one of these, he “draws” one of the three cards from the larger deck and sees how it goes. It then remains in your “hand” until you activate it using a resource called mana. Or equip. This means you can keep things that might be useful in the future even if they don’t work now, and that finding new loot is less all-or-nothing than in other roguelikes. I liked
However, the lack of a real deck-building mechanism within this card system is a big problem. With no way to curate or guide the randomness of the cards in the deck to more consistent results, I felt like I was at the mercy of the cruel RNG gods every time I ran it. Even Ravenbound’s persistent progression system, which rewards you for accomplishing in-game feats, such as defeating monsters in Ravenbound, just adds items to the overall pool. It also means that you are less likely to see certain items, for example a sword that curses anything it hits.
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There are at least a few ways to earn an item draw while running. Buying them directly from vendors who sell randomly selected items or offer you the chance to draw from a pool of specific item types is the safest bet, but clearing a camp full of monsters Requires gold that must be earned by Alternatively, elite monsters in your faction drop shards, and if you collect 3 of them, you can draw 3 cards from your deck and add 1 of them to your hand. They are often there, and you can open treasure chests to get loot. There are many opportunities to draw cards, none of which are costly (whether it’s literal money or a fight to overcome), but I always felt that I had the opportunity to spin the roulette again. I could have more influence over what was above it.
Thanks to the hate mechanic, I often chose not to spin that wheel at all. each time a card in your next draw is replaced with a card that automatically buffs all elite and boss monsters in that region. your run. Each time you combine fragments, it fills a little more of his three bars in the bottom right corner. Once one of the sections is completely filled, likewise one of the next card draws will turn into a boss he buff, allowing you to defeat the boss in that area. So after fighting an increasingly tough opponent, there’s no way to guarantee that the next card you draw will be useful, let alone beneficial.
There is an early grace period for this built into the main quest.When you enter each of the five regions for the first time, a rift will be marked on the map. Travel through these beautiful forests, dry deserts, or wet marshes to reach them (either on foot using a grappling hook or by jumping atop a special altar to switch into its eponymous crow form. by), these rifts present you with the opportunity to purge the hatred from several nearby chests while gaining large amounts of mana in the process. Defeating the Rift Guardians and looting the newly cleaned treasure for “free” will help you get into the race. For this first haul, you’d be better off rerolling a new character than trying to fly a new character for the next hour of her.
Following the main quest markers, each region spends little time beyond clearing chasms and fighting world bosses. Each section has side quests, but that includes trips to lifeless cities, conversations with wooden NPCs, and several target-killing frills from throwaway characters added with completely ignorable motivational frills. It’s an open-world game, so you’re free to explore it on your own, but there’s no great reason to explore it thoroughly. As fascinating as the cleverly designed ruins of old fortresses and enigmatic mining caves are, they’re more than worth the trouble to find just by stopping at random camps on the surface. There are often no prizes. This is a very disappointing use of Ravenbound’s beautiful Scandinavian folklore-inspired environments.
