14 DAY TRIAL // Passtech Games is the studio responsible for a little indie gem called Curse of the Dead Gods. Although the game might have gone unnoticed, the developer’s next game hopefully will have a better fate. Ravenswatch has a lot in common with Curse of the Dead Gods, although it feels like the better product despite being released in Early Access.
After playing for several hours with all six heroes available in Early Access, I can safely say that if you’re a fan of games like Hades, you should definitely give Ravenswatch a go. It’s harder than Hades and it needs some balance patches to bring both solo and co-op experiences at the same level, but other than that, the game is quite addictive.
In Ravenswatch, you take control of one of the heroes of old folk tales and legends like Beowulf, Scarlet, The Snow Queen, and The Pied Piper, and try to defeat the Nightmare. Each chapter has a boss at the end that must be defeated in order to progress. Currently, there’s just one chapter available to play, but once you kill the boss on Normal difficulty, you open Nightmare levels that just keep going up.
As expected, each hero plays like a different class with their own unique abilities that can be upgraded. The twist introduced by developers consists in the fact that you have a limited time until the boss of the chapter will be spawned, and you’ll have to fight it. This means that you have limited time to level up, gain and upgrade your powers.
The map is full of monsters, side-quests, and events that reward you with crystals that can be spent to purchase or upgrade your abilities. Once you reach level 5, you’ll unlock that character’s Ultimate, a very powerful ability with a long cooldown.
Ravenswatch plays from a top-down perspective, just like Hades. You have three lives each run after which your character must start over. Since this is a roguelike game, you will not retain anything upon your character’s death. Instead, all the abilities you unlocked during your previous run might appear and you will be able to choose them in future runs.
The more you play, the more abilities you’ll be able to unlock and the easier your future runs should be in theory. Just like in Hades, you have to figure out what abilities work better together and which ones are more powerful and are worth upgrading. Of course, there’s a lot of luck involved too since every time you level up, you are offered two random abilities to choose from.
Another interesting twist to the roguelike formula is the day/night cycle. Some heroes and many monsters act differently. For example, Scarlet turns into a werewolf with different abilities during the night cycle. It’s an interesting mechanic that challenges players to think ahead and pick their fights accordingly.
The co-op aspect is even more fun than the solo campaign and much easier. Up to four players can play together, but they have to choose different heroes, you can’t have two Scarlet or more than one Beowolf hero in the party.
Conclusion
I did enjoy my time in Ravenswatch and I think the game shapes up to be quite addictive. I’m waiting to see how the other chapters will look like to give my final thoughts, but the early access version is very playable and quite a lot of fun.
Preview key was provided by the publisher.
