{"id":13140,"date":"2009-11-27T00:55:53","date_gmt":"2009-11-27T00:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.razorianfly.com\/?p=13140"},"modified":"2010-03-20T01:03:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-20T01:03:37","slug":"ravensword","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/27\/ravensword\/","title":{"rendered":"Ravensword"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gameplay [rating:4\/5]
\nControls [rating:4\/5]
\nGraphics\/Sound [rating:4.5\/5]<\/p>\n

[rating:overall]\n<\/p><\/div>\n

You can probably count the number of good RPG style games in the App Store on one hand, and now adding to this small number of games is Ravensword: The Fallen King, published by Chillingo<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The hype surrounding this game prior to it\u2019s release was somewhat intense, especially when the app (and many more that used the unity engine) was rejected by Apple. Ravensword was resubmitted swiftly and arrived, rather surprisingly, well before expected. Given that I myself could not wait for this, I thought I\u2019d best give it a thorough play before imparting my impressions on to you.<\/p>\n

Right, let\u2019s start at the beginning\u201d\u00a6 the game starts with a short cinematic sequence which ends up with you walking up in a strange bed with an even stranger women looking over you, she explains that you were found at the edge of the forest and brought to town, unfortunately, you have amnesia and know neither who you are, let alone where you are. The strange woman then proceeds to warn you against going near the castle and sends you to see Donald.<\/p>\n

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Thus, you begin your long quest to recover your identity and find out what the hell is going on. The first quest is a standard training mission where you\u2019re given a club and sent out into the forest with the instruction to return with five rats for which you will be paid. After this, you\u2019re on your own in unwinding this gripping tale. Ravensword provides you with an open world to explore and a whole heap of side quests to accompany the main storyline, it\u2019s said that the main quest will take an estimated 6 \u201d\u201c 8 hours, and given that I\u2019ve spent a couple of hours happily killing any creature that crosses my path with no other goal in sight I can imagine that the time you spend in this world will be much greater.<\/p>\n

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Controls are handled nicely, with a virtual pad for moving forwards, backwards and side to side, whilst moving your finger around anywhere on the screen allows you to look around (anyone who has spent any time playing games on PC or Mac with a combination of keyboard and mouse should feel instantly at home with these controls). There\u2019s also the two \u201caction buttons\u201d\u009d on the right that handle fighting and jumping. You can alter the transparency of the controls (as shown in the screenshots) although the game currently doesn’t save the change (a minor issue that will be fixed in an update). On a whole I found the controls worked well, my only advice being to adjust the sensitivity in the menu to maximum as this allows you to look about far quicker and makes for an easier gaming experience that you can view from either a third or first person view.<\/p>\n

There is only one word that can sum up the graphics in this game\u201d\u00a6 sublime (don\u2019t let the screenshots fool you, the mist had rolled in when I was taking them and the images do no justice to the graphical quality of this game). Along with the music this is by far and away the most immersive game I\u2019ve come across on the iPhone. The game works flawlessly on my 3G iPhone and there is also the option to turn off shadows and foliage for an even smoother frame rate. Even the dialogue is good, and talking to some of the NPC\u2019s wields pure comedy moments that had me laughing out loud (just talk to the guy wielding the hammer in the main town).<\/p>\n

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On the run up to the release of Ravensword I heard many compare it to longstanding RGP games such as Elder Scrolls and Zelda. Upon playing it, you can see that these comparisons are not unfounded, whilst it may not have the complexity of these other titles, what has been achieved here is amazing and certainly sets the bar for future RPG games on the iDevice, I think I\u2019d even go as far as saying this sets the bar for all iPhone games, period! <\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t to say that there aren\u2019t some limitations. Unlike most (if not all) RPG titles you aren\u2019t able to customize your characters abilities as you level up, this is done automatically, which isn\u2019t necessarily a bad thing, some of the systems for setting abilities can be downright confusing and ruin an otherwise great game. Slightly more disappointing maybe the lack of magic and the limited number of weapons available, but this is a small detail that doesn\u2019t really detract from the pleasures of this game.<\/p>\n

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With plans already afoot for an update, or as it\u2019s being referred to , an expansion the few shortcomings may in fact be quite short lived, whether these additions will be free or paid for I don\u2019t quite know, and to be perfectly honest, this is one game where I\u2019d be more than happy to pay for the expansions if it meant they kept coming.<\/p>\n

Quite simply, this game is easily the best RGP in the AppStore and deserves a place on everyone\u2019s iDevice. A definite \u201cmust own\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gameplay [rating:4\/5] Controls [rating:4\/5] Graphics\/Sound [rating:4.5\/5] [rating:overall] You can probably count the number of good RPG style games in the App Store on one hand, and now adding to this small number of games is Ravensword: The Fallen King, published by Chillingo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":441,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,2127,16,17],"tags":[148,1515,2168],"class_list":["post-13140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-app-store","category-games-app-store","category-iphone","category-ipod","tag-148","tag-chillingo","tag-ravensword"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/441"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13140"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13302,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13140\/revisions\/13302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arronhirst.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}