Ravenbound

Ravenbound is a roguelike that starts out promising before being grounded by obtuse systems, frustrating loot, and lots of bugs.

There's merit in Ravenbound's kinetic combat, but the game's ambition is undermined by technical issues and an empty world.

Ravenbound’s limited successes do not come from an abundance of new ideas, but combining or juxtaposing old ones. If Ravenbound was a full-price, triple-A game I’d be a lot less forgiving of its flaws. No matter the price, it’s still derivative, janky and in serious need of optimization and bug fixes. But at less than 30 bucks, it’s maybe worth a gamble for fans of open world RPGs and action roguelikes. Provided, that is, that they temper their expectations and can overlook the game’s sometimes messy mechanics and other shortcomings.

There isn't much for me to recommend in Ravenbound - its beautiful landscapes and somewhat fun combat won't be worth the hours of fighting RNG, a lack of deck-building mechanics, and basically non-existent healing options.

Ravenbound is a game filled to the brim with unique ideas. It marries the open world and roguelike/lites genres in an interesting way, but doesn’t quite hit the mark, and feels incomplete at almost every step. The open world feels unnecessarily massive, but with very little to do. It’s also filled with annoying bugs. It’s a shame because the concept and combat are surprisingly strong, making this misstep hurt even more.

Ravenbound mixes some great ideas and beautiful scenery to intrigue the player, but fails to come through on many of the promises made.

Summing up Ravenbound was a challenge because, despite its flaws, the game isn't bad and I did have a good time when it worked as intended. However, it's just badly executed with the lack of missions, explorations, and many frustrating bugs that make Ravenbound hard to recommend. Systemic Reaction are aware of the issues and are actively talking to their community through patch notes to, hopefully, revive this game and make it the fun roguelite it's asking to be.

While Ravenbound has a great story and a few good features on the mechanics front, it still needs some improvement. What would help this game shine would be a world overhaul with a randomly generated terrain to keep things interesting and possibly a few minor quality-of-life improvements. While these flaws can take away from the overall experience, Ravenbound does have a lot of potentials to go far. But for now, there’s still a great story and literal mountains of lore to discover, maybe even a Betrayer to defeat.

Ravenbound is a highly ambiguous game that fully allows players to explore its vast ever-changing landscape. Despite its ambition, the game lacks refinement and makes the game feel underbaked and not fully developed. The game has had a lot of passion put into it. This is incredibly evident in the game's soundtrack, which is tribal and ambient and takes heavy inspiration from traditional Slavic folk music, the layered vocalizations and echoing drums just entirely immerse you into the world of Ravenbound.

Ravenbound strives to conquer the gaming skies, but its ambitiously fragile bones break underneath the weight of its own unpolished body. The world is an empty shell which desperately needs the mighty soul of some open world God, that will solve repetitive gameplay, technical issues and fill this husk of a world with some actual content, rather than just endless fighting. Neat ideas are here, and the intriguing genre mixing provides a well-deserved breath of fresh air, that unfortunately gets quickly spoiled by frustrating shortcomings'