As human tendencies are further adapted into artificial intelligence, players come to expect more from their games. When you throw a grenade, it’s not unreasonable to see an enemy either dive out of the way, jump on it to protect his squad, or hustle over to throw it back toward you. When you shoot an enemy in the leg, the expectation is that he or she will double over in pain, seek cover, and above all else, turn to their teammates to dish out revenge.
Behavioral instincts like these are nowhere to be found in Raven Squad. The original Doom’s AI, which is basically just “recognize enemy” and “fire,” shows a higher degree of realism than these enemies. Sure, you may see an enemy scamper off to a barricade after you fire a shot his way, but for whatever reason, he neglects to duck or fire back. I would call this a “high end” reaction, as the enemy actually moved. Other enemies won’t move a muscle, even after you walk all the way across the battlefield to press your gun barrel to his forehead. Another humorous example is the occasional enemy who fails to lob a grenade over his own protective barrier. Since he and his squad are too stupid to run or even recognize the grenade lying at their feet, they all die in way worthy of a Darwin Award.
Needless to say, developer Atomic Motions’ lofty ambition of melding the FPS and RTS genre into one game didn’t fare well. As cool as it is to zoom from a first-person perspective to a sky-high canvas, any chance of this system working is killed, buried, and endlessly mocked by the AI it deploys. Additionally, being able to see the morons’ location before engaging them only adds insult to injury – you have the advantage, and they don’t have the brainpower to react.
The game’s problems extend far beyond the soldiers’ movement. Bullets fired by the player cannot pass through small bushes, and in certain areas invisible collision fields block clear shots. Switching between the six characters in your squad is as easy as pressing one button, but none of them give you a clear advantage – evidenced by my successful usage of a shotgun in a sniper-type situation. The flash grenades end up being the best weapon, as enemies suffering the effects stand in one spot rubbing their eyes. You almost feel sorry for them when you pick them off one by one with weapons providing plenty of pop, yet little in terms of fluid targeting.
Atomic Games even botches the Restart mission screen through the incorporation of a “Restart” and “Retry” option. One takes you back to the beginning of the stage, the other the last checkpoint. Is it too much to ask for “Restart Mission” or “Retry Checkpoint”?
As for the mission at hand, I find it best to quote the back of the game’s box: “A plane crashed in the Amazon and you were called in to rescue the survivors and find some precious data, which in the wrong hands could become extremely perilous to national security. But now to make matters worse your plane has been hit by a SAM! Left engine’s down! You gotta jump now! You and the other surviving members of Raven Squad still have to complete your mission and just maybe make it out of this jungle alive.” This uninteresting setup goes nowhere, and is accompanied by the stalest animation and voice work I’ve seen in quite some time.
Raven Squad ends up being a laugh a second, but these are the kind of laughs that everyone can do without. Through its inability to function, Raven Squad shows us how difficult it is to make a game.