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Your squad has been called into the Amazon jungle to rescue the survivors of a plane crash and recover vital national secrets. In effect you are controlling two squads of three and shooting a bunch of bad guys. The gameplay is dated in the extreme. You have a number of missions and you can switch between FPS mode and
RTS mode at any time. You can also cycle through your men and take direct control. They each have special skills, none of which seem very special, and this forces you to use different squad members for different situations.
The ability to switch into an overhead view and command your men into position using a tactical approach and then zoom into their heads and shoot the bad guys sounds really appealing until you do it. The actual transition is quite nice but the effect is ruined by woefully sub-standard AI. These guys can’t path find, they can’t aim, they have no concept of taking cover and they will even try to shoot enemies through bullet proof scenery.
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The maps are small and they look like hedge mazes. The linear action involves killing various inept AI and the majority of levels can be cleared in minutes using no tactical thought whatsoever. If you actually stop and engage the RTS portion of the game it becomes even easier to beat.
Despite the claims about creating a new genre and the revolutionary crossover of RTS and FPS this is really just a squad based FPS which allows you to engage an aerial view. Just because you can command your men from above doesn’t really make this real-time strategy, especially since, if you want your men to actually shoot the bad guys, you’ll have to jump in and do it yourself.
There isn’t much in the unimaginative gameplay to recommend Raven Squad. To make matters worse it is ridiculously short. Even for a budget title this only offers a single night’s entertainment. There is a co-operative mode so you could in theory find a friend to join you in the action but you shouldn’t really inflict this on anyone else.
