I was very curious about this game as the video footage on the Humble page made it look very similar to the Elder Scrolls series. I'm a very big fan of Elder Scrolls games, they are deep and meaningful outstanding examples of what makes a RPG more than just a RPG. An Elder Scrolls game throws the player into an epic story line with fantastic open world exploration style game play.
Describing Ravensword: Shadowlands as being similar to an Elderscrolls game is actually a good thing. But when I looked at the Steam Community page it quickly became apparent that quite a few people that were playing Ravensword: Shadowlands didn't like it. A lot of them had tried playing it for around 10 minutes before giving up and posting on the Steam Community page about how terrible this game was.
Comments like these would certainly deter anyone considering parting with £11.99 to purchase the game directly from the Steam store however I wasn't put off as I already owned the game. Admittedly as it was part of my Humble Bundle it cost me less than 16p so I certainly wasn't going to complain about the price.
I found myself developing a morbid curiosity. What exactly is this game doing to make it so bad? I don't consider myself to be an average gamer. I worked as a games tester for many years I have been exposed to WAY more crap games than the average gamer will ever see in their life time. I like to think I possess an immunity to shit games and I was certain that this game could not possibly be any worse than Deep Silver's Ride to Hell.
I started the game and was presented with a little tutorial on how to hit enemies with a sword. Movement was done with WASD and controls similar to Elder Scrolls. Turns out I was the only survivor in a massive battle and when I woke up I got to customise my character. The first thing I noticed was that there is no option to be female. The player is forced to play as a male character. This disappointed me as I always play female characters in RPGs but I decided to press on. As I was unable to create my standard "selfie" character due to gender restraints I settled for a character that looked like Demon Santa instead.
I am given directions and told to go find a wizard called Lamil who lives in a forest. After leaving the house a friendly tutorial pop-up informed me how to open my map. Lamil's house was marked on the map just in case I hadn't bothered to read the quest text.
I started off with two weapons a bow and a sword. I figured I would try the bow first. This was a mistake which nearly resulted in death. I discovered that slowly walking backwards while shooting a wild boar in the face was the best way to mitigate damage from the boar however it was also the best way to get the attention of the rest of the boars close by and before I knew it 5 of them were attacking me. I managed to kill them but the fight was painfully close.
I found the wizard and he told me he wanted me to get him some water from a pool at the far end of a cave full of angry trolls. I then set off for the troll cave. Enroute I stumbled into a goblin. I tried to shoot him, he and his mate then killed me in two hits. I re-loaded and ran around the goblins this time and found the entrance to the troll cave.
In the troll cave I could see a troll in the distance. I tried shooting it. It ran towards me, swiped at me twice and killed me. I tried again, adopting the run backwards while shooting approach, again dead within seconds. I decided at this point that the bow and arrow was completely useless and swapped to the sword.
I was able to slash the troll about 2 - 3 times with the sword before he killed me and smashed my face into the ground. I found I had 3 unspent attribute points on my character sheet so I put them into strength to do more damage with my sword and the troll still wiped the floor with me. Frustration kicked in, what was I doing wrong?
I had been playing now for about 10 minutes and realised that I was at the point that had enraged so many gamers on the Steam community page.
I left the troll cave and focused my attention on the weaker Goblin Grunts outside the cave. While difficult to kill with the bow and arrow, they were much easier to kill with the sword. I went on a bit of a killing spree. They always dropped a small sum of gold and shield.
My first though was grab the gold, use it to buy some better equipment back in town. The shields will probably be worthless and too heavy to carry very many of them at once. I was totally wrong.
In Ravensword: Shadowlands my little demonoid Santa character was able to carry 34 Wooden Goblin Shields before becoming encumbered due to weight. The game uses a fast travel system like the Elder Scrolls games so dragging all the shields back to town to sell wasn't a problem. The NPCs were happy to pay 60 gold for each shield but annoyingly I was forced to sell them individually as the game didn't have a "sell all" button.
In a very short space of time I was able to harvest a lot of Wooden Goblin Shields from the infinitely respawning Goblin Grunts located just outside town. Wooden Goblin Shield sales paid for the best set of armor sold in town along with a much stronger sword made from white iron.
I was now able to slice through the troll cave like a hot knife through butter.
Working out how to get past the troll cave that caused so many other people to give up makes me feel glad that I didn't. So many games hold the player's hand these days and guide them along gently while spoon feeding them content. I think I'm going to keep playing this game. I want to find the Ravensword.
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