Raven's Cry (PC) review

After long wait we finally get our hands on Raven's Cry, a game that promised to have great appeal to all fans of pirate world and has a setting and some worthy ideas of gender but fails to make the grade with some really bad in terms of interface and combat and graphics problems and details that don’t measure or the previous generation of consoles decisions.

Raven's Cry leads, for some time, struggling to live, to reach the market after many problems in its development (including two delays) after lifting the expectation of the fans of pirate life with promises of a realistic game, that really going to recreate the Caribbean as it deserved, as a dirty world full of evil and violence and this precisely by the impressive Collector's Edition is one of the few things that have captured our attention as the game, in general, not up to scratch anywhere.

In Raven's Cry take control of Christopher Raven, a sadistic and evil pirate who just wants to fatten his bag of gold coins and become a legend, like any other pirate. However, soon after starting our Raven adventure you will encounter a ghost from the past, with one faction murdered his entire family when he was only a child and will give us an excuse to undertake (if not original) dark and interesting adventure story level.

Technically the game fails to measure up to what is expected of a title for the new generation of consoles or PC and not only that, but in some ways pays almost level with titles beginning of last generation. We refer primarily to the physical animation and game (almost nonexistent), rough, too simple and fluent doubtful, especially when swimming, jumping or performing some moves. Graphically the game has several contrasts and textures that look pretty good on the screen and they do a great mixed with others that are not up together, especially when you look at the hair or fluids and behold as bloody as one of the least worked respects, the graphics is water, just a great player in a game of pirates, proposed, is at its best when we are at sea.

Seeing the poor quality of some of these issues we might think that, at least, we could run the game at a high rate and stable frames, but nothing is further from reality, as Raven's Cry, PC, suffers from continuous problems performance, with tearing, an annoying fog to hide the popping open water, drops frames in random situations and with some errors that pull us to the operating system the game on the PC version. This problem seems to be accentuated in Mac, which have seen some complaints from users via Steam.

Visually another thing to fail is the game interface, unattractive and too simple for the times. In the fighting, for example, we will see a fairly simple red bar indicates the enemy's life or experience appears to kill an opponent or what sacked from his dead body with simple white lettering that cause no visual impact. The design of it is not too successful, because it makes us lose sight of continuing the center of the screen, indicating, for example, the distance toward our goal with a small number in the lower left side of the screen.

As for the fighting on land, the truth is that not enjoy almost any attractive with failures to execute attacks that seem to have no impact on enemies, coarse locking system and focus the enemy serving more rather low, since it is rather inefficient and random. Yes we have some attractive skill, like a shot that will use pressing key 4 and it's pretty spectacular but perhaps the only good point in this type of situation. To this must be added the bad job with the physical and the sound which we discussed before, as when hitting an enemy the game does not give us a real feeling that something happened without a clear sound without weighing in the movement of our weapon, because through it without any grace as if there were nothing before and the poor man falls to the ground in a rather unnatural when falls prey to the edge of our sword.

And all this that we say above is a shame, because the truth is that the game has some very attractive features such as the atmosphere in the Caribbean, a world represented as wanted its developers, a cruel, dark shape, bluntly A world full of filth, violence of pirates, brothels, beverage, blood, urine and sex that will delight all fans of this epoch, all accompanied by some pretty interesting missions and put us in the skin of a pirate, like accepting orders to attack enemy ships, treasure hunt, beat us in mourning under the laws of piracy for a boat, all seasoned with the typical mini-games like dice in taverns and continuous decision making will affect the future of game development.

The maritime part of Raven's Cry also meets solvency with a management system, improvement and purchase of new vessels is quite attractive and reminiscent at times to some strategic trading and combat simulators of the time. We will have to repair our boat, buy a new boat improve the helmet, weapons, find new crew to enhance our performance and be more likely to escape alive from the fighting and missions we have to make offshore that are quite interesting and that makes the game win many integers in these parts but still appear insufficient.

Conclusion:

Raven's Cry is a game with good ideas, with an atmosphere that perfectly reflects the violence and the harsh reality of the Caribbean in the seventeenth century and an ability to manage our vessels, improving combat ships, buying new or enrolling best crew to more easily deal with a sea battles that are quite interesting as well as its history, full of darkness, for once, puts us in the shoes of one of the bad guys without disguise it somehow.

However, these good ideas are burdened by a technical section that no longer meets the expectations of the PC users or the new generation of consoles, but is not up to the end of life for PS3 or Xbox 360 counting on some details that seem rather removed from the beginning of life of the past generation consoles. We speak of physical or some too rough animations that adversely affect the game, as well as an unattractive interface and is quite uncomfortable for the user.

To all this we must add its performance problems, with drops of frames without reach 60 FPS in high-end equipment that are accompanied by errors that can reach us to pull the desk. This problem seems to be even greater in Mac, where users have reported numerous errors through the game's forums on Steam. Special mention the sound problems, and conversations with poor facial animations.