Raven's Cry (video game)

Gameplay

The story is divided into chapters. In these chapters, Christopher, the player controlled character, is tracking down a particular pirate known as Neville Scranton, who he blames for leading the leading some former pirates who took part in the massacre of the only people he has ever loved.

Raven's Cry also features role-playing game elements, including morality system, side-quests, and magic items which can increase character attributes. Systems for 'Fear' and 'Notoriety' make the world around you react to your actions and choices. Killing enemies makes you accumulate 'Fear' which you can use to scare enemies away or as a super attack. The consequence is that everyone in range becomes hostile if you didn't scare them off. 'Notoriety' is increased as you do your murderous thing and similar to Assassin's Creed II's notoriety system with posters on the wall you can rip off. Opponents bleed and suffer which affects the moral aspects of the game. Pirate charms will let you become invincible, summon ravens to rip enemies to shreds, boost attack speed and damage, and even cast some magic.

Development

The original idea and most of the work for the game was done by Octane Games, which is a subsidiary company of Nitro Games. The first public announcement for the game happened in 2011 when Octane Games told the local press about it. They also mentioned that Topware Interactive would publish the game.

Octane Games failed to keep up with development timetables, and in 2013, after many delays, TopWare Interactive made a “tough decision to reorganize the project” which meant that Reality Pump would finish up the game.

Reception

Raven's Cry received a 1/10 score from GameSpot, the lowest possible score on the site. It received an aggregated score of 25.71% on GameRankings based on 7 reviews; received a 27/100 on Metacritic based on 16 reviews; and a "Mostly Negative" on Steam based on 200 user reviews.

Raven's Cry was accused of being released in an unfinished state as large chunks of content were missing and the game was unplayable due to a large amount of technical issues (such as numerous bugs and glitches, frequent crashing, frame-rate stuttering, character's dialogue files often not playing during cutscenes, and bad NPC animations). The game was also criticized for its difficult to follow and uninspired plot, open world, outdated graphics, clunky controls and combat, bad collision detection, offensive and racist writing, complete lack of tutorials, poor voice acting (the developers claimed that the actor who voiced Christopher was a random person they hired off the street with no acting experience), and gameplay that tended to be boring at most points.

Writing for IGN, Brandin Tyrrel gave the game a 3/10, citing its inconsistent dialogue, clunky combat, rigid control and game-stopping crashes. He summarized the review by saying that "I genuinely do think the potential for a good pirate game is in here, somewhere, but Raven’s Cry is a mess of bugs, hazards, hiccups, oversights, and progression-halting crashes. If you never set foot on land, its ship-to-ship combat might be respectable, but this adventure insists on taking you places no self-respecting pirate captain should go."

Daniel Starky, writing for Eurogamer, recommended that people avoid this game. He criticized the plot, stating that "...tension and drama is soon lost...as the plot drops for a noxious cocktail of clichés." He also criticized the open world and combat, stating that " Raven's Cry wants so desperately to have an open world, but never quite understands why" and that "Combat is beyond bland."

Allegra Frank, writing for Polygon, put Raven's Cry among the "Worst videogames of 2015"

Re-release

As a result of the original game's poor critical and community reception, Reality Pump announced on October 19, 2015 that they were planning to re-release the game under the title Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry. The new version features new gameplay mechanics, voice-overs, missions, weapons and upgrades. It was finally released on November 20, 2015, and players of the original Raven's Cry will get the new version as a free update. However, the re-release also received negative reviews.

Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry was suddenly pulled from Steam on January 28, 2016. Neither Topware nor Reality Pump have released any official explanation for this, however it has been speculated that allegations of "fake" positive reviews were what led to the game's removal from sale. As of July 2016, however, the game has been restored to the Steam Store.