A First Impression of RavenBound

Developer: Systemic Reaction™

Publisher: Systemic Reaction™

Released: 30 March, 2023

Price: $30 USD

It's been great to see new attempts in the deck building genre of gaming. While providing new ways to play them, but they have also been a mixed bag of disappointment for many reasons, some developers tend to go a bit to far.

Many deck-building games have been launched in recent years, some of which are truly fantastic and others of which leave you wondering how they made it beyond beta testing or why they were even thought of in the first place.

RavenBound offers a colorful looking "open-world" that is neither amazing nor dreadful. This is mostly due to the fact that it doesn't feel finished enough in its current condition. It simply lacks a lot of features that other games offer.

Gameplay

Lacking

Due to all of the exploitable defects and problems with the iFrames of the player character, the base battle is really weak in its foundation, making you invincible if you know what you're doing while looking entirely silly.

Don't get me wrong—if you're not deliberately trying to destroy the game from the inside out, there is some fun combat. But unless they fix a few of these problems to make battle more engaging and polished, it's still not that amazing.

When you defeat the adversaries at the corrupted power source, the power will be released and all the neighbouring chests will be unlocked. These chests are locked behind "hatred" cards, which are essentially de-buffs that will eventually prohibit you from unlocking any more cards preventing any more build damage.

Graphics & Issues

Tutorial bugs

Not even 15 seconds into the game, I encountered my first graphical bug and issues, such as the lack of underwater textures, the requirement to respawn as a bird before entering the water, or the tutorial's inability to load or respawning, which causes you to become stuck until you kill yourself and restart the run.

The game looks okay

The visuals are passable, aside from the flickering screen and a few other small issues, but your characters, who you can only play as humans until you can afford the animal races, just look dull and not very interesting at first glance.

Concerns

Early Access / Tech Demo

To be completely honest with you, this game currently does not feel like a fully launched game. There aren't many things to do right now other than run around, or in this instance, fly around the map to every place your raven eyesight can detect, level up with mana cards and equipment cards, and engage in progressively dull battles. There are a couple brief quests, but after that there are none. Hence, there is no motivation to go outside and explore.

Music resetting

The soundtrack abruptly flips to a brand-new song and cuts off the previous one whenever you enter a new section or combat without fading out smoothly.

Although it doesn't bother me all that much, the frequency with which it occurs makes trying to listen to the music challenging and annoying.

Conclusion

The building blocks are there

I can look past most of the imperfections, and can genuinely say that the game has a lot of promise, as an Early Access game, not the full release in it's current state, especially with the added DLC they have on release. It's just wrong.

Apart of the fact that the characters and customization are at a minimal, the world itself looks beautiful, and could be more if the developers worked more on actually making things behave the way they should, rather than cover it up with lazy effort like hiding a pool of water, under a river texture.

I'll give the game a few more hours to see if anything worthwhile comes forth, but I am not holding my breath on that happening anytime soon.

My initial thoughts on this game come to a close with the caveat that, while others may disagree, that is what makes gamers unique. You don't have to share their interests or agree with them and are welcome to critic me on mine.

If you want to catch me on one of my streams or locate me on social media, you may do so at the following locations, I'm always playing something new.

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- Pawkt