Raven Squad First Look

 Raven Squad isn't your typical first-person shooter. Nor is it your typical real-time strategy game. Rather, it's a hybrid of the two in which you can swap views to gather intelligence, move your squads, or take the action head on. Though the game's release this fall is rapidly approaching, we've just now gotten our first look at the game at the German Games Conference. 

Raven Squad begins with an elite group of mercs being sent to the Amazon to retrieve a package from a downed plane. As fate would have it, their plane soon suffers the same fate as it is shot down en route. Once the smoke clears, there are only eight survivors. This game follows their adventures as they first try to complete the mission as planned and then switch goals to survival when an a civil war breaks out. 

You can play Raven Squad either in the first person or zoomed out in a classic RTS overhead view. This, as the story goes, is made possible by a series of satellites positioned overhead that provide a full 3D view of your surroundings. When zoomed out, you can control the two squads of four individually. One is an assault squad, perfect for close range combat, while the other is an infiltrator squad that prefers long range attacks. While in this mode, you can maneuver the squads around and get an advance view of what lies ahead. This will give you the jump on any enemies camped out around corners or behind buildings. 

Of course, if you want, you can play the entire game in first-person. The two views can be switched to and from at any time and you also have the option of swapping between any of the eight players in first-person mode at your leisure. You won't get as much advance info this way, but it may be the way to go for people that hate real-time strategy games. 

SouthPeak stressed that Raven Squad is all about tactics. We watched a single mission where the squad moved down a jungle path and into a hostile village. The goal was to retrieve a package, but the local militants wouldn't make that easy. Thankfully, the player knows exactly where every enemy is in advance through the RTS mode. From there, you can simply swap back into first-person and hop around corners to get the jump on unsuspecting saps. 

The entire Raven Squad game can be played in co-operative mode through the net or on a local area network. In this mode, each player takes control of a single squad of four mercs. The game ramps up the difficulty if you do this since the designers found you could simply charge through the game, laying everything to waste without recourse, if you played with a friend. 

If there's one major drawback to Raven Squad, it's that the game is quite close to release and still suffering from technical issues. There's quite a lot of pop-in on the field of view, something that shouldn't be happening with a game of this visual fidelity. We'll have more on Raven Squad once we get our hands on it and can test out the different viewpoints for ourselves. 


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