The scenarios surrounding our collective doom are as disparate as the coming of a zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, post-nuclear wastelands populated by mutants or, as is the case with Ravaged, a planet ruined by excess and natural disaster.
And so a ravaged, haggard landscape plays backdrop to the shooter from 2Dawn Games. Broken bridges hang over dried-out river beds, snow climbs up broken buildings, famous landmarks lay in tatters: it's a horrible knackered mess.
There's not much left, but what remains is fought over by two opposing factions. The Scavengers and The Resistance fight over the precious resources left behind in the wake of society's fall from grace.
Ravaged joins an ever expanding list of online first-person shooters available to download on PC. What sets it apart from the pack is the heavy emphasis on vehicular combat; there's tanks, buggies, cars, trucks, quads and helicopters to play around with, and of course, you can go old school and use your feet.
Canyon, Chasm, Bridge and Oilrig are all dusty maps, and Liberty is dusty too, but the inclusion of the head of the Statue of Liberty makes it standout somewhat. Derelict gets a bit more colour, but it's still pretty dusty. Icebreaker is snow white, with two halves of a ship playing host to the mayhem, and Rooftop retains a similar wintery aesthetic, with the Eiffel Tower looming in the distance.
Whilst the layout for each of the maps is entirely distinctive, they can't shake off the visual similarities. There's not much diversity here, but given the setting that's forgivable. They work because, whilst they might look alike, there's enough variety in their design for each map to feel different.
The maps themselves vary in size and function. Some are absolutely huge, designed to cater for those interested in the vehicular combat, whilst there are others are more suited to combat on foot. On the larger maps people can race around in any of the available vehicles, carrying comrades whilst chasing after resources and capturing bases. There's plenty of open spaces for the two factions to contest, with outcrops of rocks and the abandoned remnants of society providing cover to those on foot. Helicopters (which are incredibly tricky to master) buzz over ahead like fire-spitting flies, raining down death from above on anyone unlucky enough to attract their unwanted attention.
Gameplay swings between soldiers clashing on foot inside bases, and Mad Max-like armoured battles in the more open spaces. Resources are marked on the map, and these usually form the point of contact between the two forces, with both teams racing from objective to objective, scrapping along the way.
The vehicular combat is good fun. Though it's not normally my cup of tea, I found myself regularly hopping into cars as both passenger and driver. Some vehicles have mounted turrets, others just allow teammates to hang out the windows whilst brandishing machine guns. The helicopter is quite finicky to control, and I didn't bother with it (after a few explosive attempts), preferring instead to maneuver around the field on quad bikes and in dune buggies, then lying in wait at choke points with either a sniper rifle or a uzi, ready to spring a trap on any unsuspecting enemies that might stray into my path.
Combat is a blast, and engaging the enemy is usually frantic fun. There's nearly always vehicles sliding around on the periphery of the skirmishes, meaning bullets aren't the only things likely to slam into you. Attention has clearly gone into ensuring ballistics are consistent, and you can see the progression of each individual bullet as it cuts through the air.
There are five different classes to choose from, though they have different names in the two opposing factions. The basics are all represented, you can blast away up-close and personal with a shotgun/uzi combo, snipe from range with a rifle, fire rockets or opt for the generic mid-range assault rifle option. Whichever way you go, 2Dawn has covered all the bases; there's a class suited to every playing style, and a short amount of experimentation should reveal your ideal character.
So the vehicular combat is fun, the first-person shooting is decent, the game has unique aesthetic, several maps and there's a variety of different characters. Given all of those things, you probably think that this Frontline article would be a glowing endorsement for Ravaged, and it would be were it not for the fact that there's nobody playing the game. And when I say nobody, I literally mean nobody.
For a game that only launched in October, there's a surprising lack of players on the Ravaged servers. At the time of writing there are more servers live than players playing the game. Numbers have been dropping steadily over the last few weeks, and whilst early games would easily see upwards of a dozen people scrapping it on each server, now the game sometimes struggles to attract a dozen players to all of their servers combined.
This is a major problem, and it makes it very hard to recommend Ravaged, even though there's plenty of merit in other areas of the game. There's often enough players to sustain a single game, but the teams are populated by very experienced players, and so newcomers are usually dispatched pretty quickly. It's not unusual to get an ass-kicking in a match, only to then head over to the ranked leaderboard and see the names of those that repeatedly killed you sitting pretty at the top of the pile.
It's a massive shame, because there's a decent shooter here, there's just no community forming around it. If there were more people playing it wouldn't be difficult to recommend: there's enough there to set it apart from the crowd, the mechanics are robust and the combat satisfying. The game is also priced very reasonably, when you consider the overall quality of the package and the amount of content you get for your investment.
Ravaged is a good game, but that doesn't matter one little bit if people aren't playing it. If there's some kind of renaissance (maybe when the announced DLC lands on December 20?) then check it out by all means, but as it stands the empty servers leave game severely hamstrung.
