Raven's Cry

As an RPG, it's a disaster. Seen as a trashy pirate adventure it's crazy, funny and absurd.

Raven's Cry is an embodiment of the term "wasted opportunity". On the basis of a great atmosphere and some interesting ideas there grew a game making an awful first impression, a game full of bugs and a wobbly gameplay. Right now Raven's Cry isn't worth its price tag but don't forget about it - after some patches and a significant price drop it should be playable.

Raven’s Cry tries to establish a dark and brutal revenge-character among related pirate games like Risen 3 or AC 4: Black Flag. The result of the release version 1.00 is quite disappointing. Though the naval battles are somewhat fun, there are too many bugs and technical issues in the entire game. The voice acting is awful, the graphics poor, the story/plot could be so much more exciting, but it is filled with dumb dialogue. The islands can be explored in some kind of way like it has to be in an open-world game, but there is almost nothing to explore. The melee-combat is worse, as are the AI, stealth-feature and terrible animation bugs. A big patch will be released, but even if it fixes technical problems, the game still suffers from bad design, poor story and boring characters.

Raven's Cry has very few redeemable qualities. Despite having the potential to be the ultimate pirate adventure, and the inclusion of a ton of features, it's not very fun to play and has quite a few technical issues.

Raven's Cry encompasses a great idea, and it certainly looks nice until things are in motion, when they immediately start falling apart.

After so many delays my expectations were quite low. And even then what I had to witness is quite underwhelming. Broken quests, bad dialogue, a fight system from hell. Next to this, Risen 2 feels like a game of the year candidate. If it weren’t for the halfway interesting sea battles I would have gone back to Sid Meier’s Pirates much earlier.

No one enjoys when a game fails this spectacularly, especially when so many people would love to play a pirate RPG.

There's really not much to say about Raven's Cry. It's an utter disaster, plagued not just by bugs, but by a terrible storyline and a lame gameplay.

Raven’s Cry has a couple of good ideas and potential to be a good pirate game but it has a lot of graphics and sound problems and a very poor combat system. A little deception for fans of the pirate’s world.

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 haven’t guessed it already, Raven’s Cry is quite blatantly unfinished.

I suspect that if I took the ridiculous money needed to buy Raven’s Cry and instead spent it on a crate of pins, chewed them all up, swallowed them, followed up with salt, washed everything down with lemon juice and then excreted, I would have as much fun as I had in the Caribbeans by Reality Pump. [04/2015, p.52]

It’s disgusting on almost every level, and the fact Topware is selling it for $54.99 is unforgivable.

The game is unfinished, a chore when you can play it, and full of disgusting vitriol aimed at women and people of color. Buy a ticket for a different ship.