Ravenbound

Ravenbound isn’t technically broken in any way, its design is just fundamentally flawed on multiple levels. It’s an open world rogue-like where you’re punished for exploration and every weapon class plays the exact same. Almost every enemy type is some variant of bipedal humanoid and all the bosses are the same things with different weapons. You have zero freedom as to how to tackle each run and once you’ve beaten the game there’s NO incentive to play it again. There’s also zero characters or story or any sort of atmosphere of any kind. Just bland on bland. To its credit tho the combat is functional and there are a lot of decent synergies when making builds, something a lot of rogue-likes get wrong. If you pick it up on sale you might have 5ish hours of fun but the cracks start to show REALLY quickly.

Ravenbound ------------------------ Ravenbound is one of those games that's way more interesting than its review score makes it look. The whole idea of mixing an open world with a roguelite is honestly kind of genius, and flying around the map as a raven never stopped being the part I looked forward to most. It doesn't always stick the landing though. The world is nice to look at, but after a while you realize you're doing the same fights and objectives over and over. It gets repetitive faster than I hoped. Combat is fun once you get used to it, and putting builds together kept me coming back for a few more runs than I expected. It definitely feels like a game with big ideas that just needed more time to flesh everything out. If you can look past the rough edges, there's a genuinely fun game here that's doing something different instead of playing it safe. I'd say grab it on sale, go in with reasonable expectations, and you'll probably have a better time than the reviews suggest. Enjoy the game.

My advice, only purchase the game on extreme discount. It is hollow and buggy, but for three euro it's super fun to turn into a bird. Also, a grappling hook in a game where you can turn into a bird? Lmao

For $5 it's alright but that's it. The game presents you with a large open world to explore however it will punish you for doing that by giving you curses that will remove your build by locking out the slots you had just spent mana on fitting cards into, increase cost of said cards you need to build your character and the curses cycle every single time you loot for more cards for your build so it turns into a vicious cycle of softlocking yourself. So play a cookie cutter playstyle or ruin your run each time. This game is more about the illusion of choice. So the gameplay loop becomes... 1. You need cards to become stronger. They cost mana. 2. Opening chests can give a card to gain mana but chests also can increase Hatred. 3. Hatred gives a curse that cycles each time you loot for cards e.g. increases mana costs, steal your mana, steal your coin or lock slots for cards which if a card is slotted when this happens then you lose the card with it. Hatred can also cycle to lower your damage and armour values. 5. Less mana means fewer cards can be slotted. Less coin means you can't buy cards or heal. You can run against a limited number of "wardens" 1 time each to clear…

This game is beautiful, but holy crap it sucks. It SEEMS like it could super fun, but the number one problem and the cause of the game to be a complete slog and buzzkill is the mana. You hardly get any mana to equip the cards you find and after you clear like 3 camps you'll be tapped out on cards so you can't equip any cards because you don't have any mana, and now you can't collect any more cards because your hand is full because your mana is still at ZERO! I was clearing camps literally no problem, but what's the point if I can't progress my character. Over the course of an hour I probably killed 60+ enemies, cleared a few troll mini bosses, cleared out 30 camps, did a few quests and Finally. Had. Enough. I upgraded my armor once, equipped 2 relics and found 1 new weapon and this seems to be a looper game. The idea of doing an entirely new run of this garbage sent a chill down my spine, 'please, God no'. The game mechanics felt a little chaotic at first, but I seemed to get a decent grasp on it within the hour I played. I didn't hate the main character, but seriously as soon as I saw MC I was like "oh boy, this might not end well.", but honestly there's a really decent game here…

These folk could have made a better Skyrim but I guess this is okay too.