Raven Squad: Hidden Dagger review

Raven Squad -- Operation: Hidden Dagger is an ambitious FPS and RTS hybrid. Although it succeeds in melding together two disparate types of game mechanics, it fails to capture the best elements of either genre.

Raven Squad puts you in the role of “Paladin” and two squad mates. After his team drops into the jungle for a little Guerrilla-cleansing jungle fighting, the situation quickly goes FUBAR and it’s up to you lead Paladin and his men out of the Guerrilla-infested jungles. villages, and towns and home to safety.

Although Paladin is essentially the game’s protagonist, you can freely switch between any men under his command in first-person mode (more men join him early on the game, forming into squads of three).
Occasionally you might need (or want) to switch control over to another squad mate to use their weapons. For example, you might want to switch to your heavy weapons man “Thor” to use his rocket launcher. Or you can switch to another squad mate with a sniper rifle, or still others to use their grenades (frag, smoke, or flashbangs depending on the character).

Pressing the spacebar shifts the game into a top-down, RTS view, in which you can command your squads to take positions and attack certain objective points. Downed comrades can be revived by pressing Q for a short time, and ammo and health can be picked up as you progress through the game’s very linear missions. (Just fyi, that 'very linear' is in italics because it's a bad thing.)

A valiant attempt

Unfortunately, while Raven Squad does a decent job of marrying two different game types, it fails to strike alchemical gold. While there is some promise to what Raven Squad achieves, it ultimately feels like two mediocre games stitched together with golden thread.

The best parts of a good FPS game are (generally speaking) intense action, satisfying explosion weapons and explosions, challenging enemy AI, and some degree of tactical opportunities and exploration.

Raven Squad succeeds at making the guns reasonably satisfying – but everything else fails.

The environments are virtually non-reactive and offer few real tactical options, such as sneaking through the jungle and flanking your enemies. You pretty much get strung along like a fish on a hook, taking cover and shooting lots of very dumb enemies. There are lots of things to hide behind -- and lots of enemies to shoot, generally, because they come in droves -- but you have virtually no freedom to explore any serious tactical options.

Your enemies don’t even react when they get shot, often leaving you to wonder if you’re even hitting them. They behave with little intelligence other than taking cover, but for the most part they just stand in front of your hails of bullets shooting back at you -- until they run out of hit points and die like giant RTS blow up dolls.

In addition, your squad mates are scarcely any smarter than your enemies. For the most part, they’ll just follow you along and help out a little, but it’s pretty much up to you to take point and gun down the bad guys. (I think I killed about ten Guerillas for every one that my squad mates took out.)

What about the RTS?

The mediocre FPS action might be somewhat forgivable if the RTS mode was solid – but it isn’t. Switching to RTS mode for a tactical battlefield view seldom reveals anything useful aside from enemy locations, health kits, and ammo dumps. But because the game is so linear, you rarely need to know where those things are, because you'll find them anyway.

Your best tactic is (more often than not) just group all your idiot squad mates together and follow the breadcrumb trail from objective to objective. You do the

A large part of this (again) comes back to the fact that you can scarcely trust your men to find their asses with both hands. If want something done right (or done at all), you pretty much have to swoop into FPS mode and take care of business yourself.

Overall

An RTS/FPS hybrid should allow you to command troops in such a way to spring a coordinated ambush on an enemy camp -- and then let you jump into FPS mode and enjoy the firefight thrill ride. It should be the kind of experience that lets you light up that (virtual) cigar and chuckle “I love it when a plan comes together” after a satisfying encounter. And then it should throw all new tactical challenges at you, rife with possibilities for different strategic approaches.

That’s a game I’d want to play. That's the game I think Raven Squad wants to be.

Raven Squad, unfortunately, is not that game -- at least not in this iteration. It fails to be a good shooter and a compelling RTS. Toss in the mediocre voice acting, script, and other production values, and Raven Squad just can't hold a candle to shooters like Wolfenstein -- especially at a $40 price point.