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| From Kickstarter to kick your... |
On February 8th of this year (2012), Double Fine Productions launched a Kickstarter campaign to get enough funding to create a new adventure game, with the project title simply being Double Fine Adventure. After eight hours of the project being launched, the funding goal of $900,000 USD was met and throughout the several weeks thereafter, the project garnered a total of over 3.3 million U.S. dollars - setting a new Kickstarter record for the most funded project since its 2009 launch. Following this record-breaking project, Kickstarter and video games have become synonymous with each other and this belief has been further impounded by other highly successful projects like Wasteland 2, OUYA, and Project Eternity.
Hidden among the Kickstarter masses was
the subject of today's discussion, Ravaged. Launched on April 6th,
its Kickstarter campaign was admittedly quite small. The
money that would be pledged to the project would first go towards
marketing and publishing, while the base game itself remained in a
near-complete state. However, due to its special situation, Ravaged
is among the first of the Kickstarter games to be released and
available for purchase. While seeming to be nothing special at first
glance, this is one of the first times we get to see whether Kickstarter contributors have wisely donated their money to a product. But, does Ravage deserve to be on store's shelves?
Indeed it does. Ravaged does justice to all of its contributors, but in a different way than many of them might
expect.
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| Liberty has fallen |
While the game does feature the somewhat
overused setting of the apocalypse, Ravaged actually uses it accordingly, compared
to most other games of its type. Each map has its own structure and theme, adding
great variety to the small selection of only eight. What compliments
this variation is the high graphics settings, which displays these maps brilliantly, if you have the horsepower to achieve it. (I tested the game with a
Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, with 4 GB of RAM and unfortunately, I could only produce a smooth frame rate on the lowest settings, so you're going to need a decent amount of horsepower to get the full experience that Ravaged has to offer.) The maps are fairly large, which
can occasionally be frustrating as lowly-populated servers often times yield mouse-chases to see if the other players on the
scoreboard aren't just figments of your imagination. However, the map
sizes are large enough to accommodate the various vehicles which
Ravaged has on offer.
The vehicles of Ravaged are certainly
the highlight of the game. While the tin may say that Ravaged is a
team-based multiplayer shooter and that description is true, Ravaged
works best as a vehicular combat game. Other than being
player-killing machines, all of the vehicles have a balanced weight
and speed to them. This balance not only makes driving the vehicles a
great amount of fun, but they become even more pleasing when jumping
off of a ramp in such a way as to get maximum hang-time, or accurately
smashing into another player to stop them dead in their tracks. This
balance also makes the car chases between players absolutely thrilling
sequences, the likes of which few games have managed to accomplish in recent
memory.
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| Fly like a wasp, sting like a bee |
The first-person shooter elements of
Ravaged fair a bit worse than the great vehicles. To put it bluntly,
there's nothing special about the shooting mechanics here. The classes
fill their respective roles and the only one that I found enormously fun playing as was the Demolitionist, but that's mostly because their explosives can severely damage vehicle-riding
players and their modes of transportation. The guns' kickback for each class feels very soft, with the gun that exemplifies this the most being the sniper rifle, which has no kickback at all - only moving the gun's aim by a few centimetres with each shot fired. The class customization and selection menus are counter intuitive and
off-putting, as changes happen instantaneously. The little bits of class
customization that's featured here is bare-bones too, which is sadly, yet again another missed opportunity here.
However, the shooting mechanics do
compliment the vehicles' mechanics in some much appreciated ways. The slow
player movements really emphasize the speed of the vehicles along
with the weight those vehicles carry. Skilled shooters can kill
players while they reside in their vehicle's driver seats, leading to several
moments of bizarre terror as the rest of the vehicle-hitching players
realize that their driver has just been shot dead.
The game modes here are
unfortunately few and unoriginal. Besides the standard Team
Deathmatch, the only other game modes are Resource Control and
Thrust, which are just renamed Capture-The-Flag and Control Point modes respectively. It is a shame too, as the modes don't emphasize
the vehicles or make players exploit them to their maximum
potential.
On the audio front, it does the job of
being 'audible' quite well. Gunshots and explosions can be heard clearly, as well as the sounds of motors and helicopter blades.
Besides those sounds and an average narrator who wants to
out "counter-strike" Counter-Strike's narrator (but has too much soul
to do so), there's nothing else to discuss here. The sound is there and
it exists.
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| Or does the wasp get stung? |
Overall, Ravaged has delivered on the
donations of its contributors as a Kickstarter project and has turned
out to be a somewhat flawed, but still an adequately fun game at the same time. We can only hope
that unreleased, Kickstarter funded games can live up to standard
which Ravaged has set for them.
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