Passtech Games PS5 Ravenswatch PS5 review Review

Ravenswatch Review (PS5) – Fables, Heroes & Nightmares Clash In This Imaginatively Constructed Roguelike

ravenwatch ps5 review

Long before this review was written, I think it’s fair to say that the top-down roguelike genre was already overflowing with like-minded and like-designed efforts that largely struggled to separate themselves from one another. Having cut its teeth on its previous roguelike effort, Curse of the Dead Gods, developer Passtech Games had something a little more radical in mind for its latest attempt at the genre, Ravenswatch.

Imagine, if you would, a who’s who of popular fables and mythological tales all jammed together in a singular struggle to tackle a Lovecraftian cosmic entity with the power to corrupt our very dreams into nightmares and manifest them in the real world. That’s the premise of Ravenswatch, a roguelike that, well, wants to do things a little differently than its peers and succeeds in doing so to a more than satisfying result – albeit one that could do with a little more content (but more on that in a bit).

Ravenswatch PS5 Review


A Resoundingly Clever Roguelike

After an entertaining enough introductory cutscene sets the narrative stage, Ravenswatch asks players to either kick things off in solo or get together a team, which is a bit easier than it normally would be thanks to the small miracle of crossplay. From here, you can pick out one of four different heroes from the pages of myth and folklore fables and thus Ravenswatch begins its roguelike shenanigans in earnest.

Viewed from the sort of elevated, third-person perspective that fans of Diablo and other looter action RPGs will find immediately familiar, Ravenswatch also feels functionally equivalent for the first couple of minutes too, as your chosen hero cuts about the place laying waste to all manner of nightmarish baddies. Very quickly however, it also becomes quite apparent that Ravenswatch is also doing something very different, too.

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At a high level, the main goal in Ravenswatch is to destroy the Master Nightmare – a sprawling many-tentacled monstrosity plucked from the depths of Lovecraftian mythology that just so happens to boast a ton of hit points while hitting you like a truck made of hammers. However, instead of being a big bad that you’ll tangle with at the end of the game, the Master Nightmare actually appears as the boss for each of Ravenswatch‘s three different biomes, becoming increasingly hard to put down as you progress through the biomes.

Where things become a little more complex is in how you tackle the Master Nightmare within each biome. You see, within each biome, your time is limited to three days of time pass and when this time runs out, you will automatically be thrust into a death struggle against the Master Nightmare that has stewardship of that biome. What you can do however, is actually seek out the Master Nightmare and preemptively attack it, or, better yet, spend time gaining XP, upgrading your abilities, scooping up loot and completing side-quests to further improve your chances for the big fight. You can even directly attack parts of the Master Nightmare beforehand and reduce the amount of health it has by the time that fateful scrap wheels itself around.

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The thing is – and this is where Ravenswatch deftly taps into the roguelike rulebook – is that each of these three biomes is randomly generated across each playthrough. This means that the locations of the various treasure chests, health replenishment basins and more besides change each time you play and so this very much underscores the versatile design and sense of risk and reward that arguably sits at the heart of the Ravenswatch experience.

Ultimately, success in Ravenswatch is all about being prepared. Though you might want to jump right away into a nearby side quest as soon as you start a fresh playthrough, you probably shouldn’t because it’s likely you’re not not powerful enough and so you should expect to fail such quests early on. As such, it pays to search around the map a bit and track down some treasure chests, score some gold fragments to trade in for ability upgrades and anything else you can get your hands on before you take on such tasks – even if it isn’t immediately obvious exactly where everything is on each playthrough.

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It’s this system which also proves to be a blissfully engaging part of Ravenswatch‘s design makeup, since you always find yourself scurrying around the map in search of additional XP and precious loot, using fast travel points to maximise your search time while the minutes and seconds wind their way down ahead of the inevitable battle with the Master Nightmare.

Ravenswatch also puts its best foot forward with its selection of heroes. Though additional heroes such as Aladdin and more can be unlocked through extended play, players can initially choose from the Pied Piper, Scarlet (an immensely cool Little Red Riding Hood/Wolf Man mashup), Beowulf and the Snow Queen. What is really great about this selection however, isn’t just the fact that on the surface at least these all appear to be very different characters, but also that they play almost entirely differently too – with each character boasting their own strengths, weaknesses, abilities and special skills.

The Pied Piper can fire out a steady stream of damaging magical notes (notably making Ravenswatch feel somewhat like a twin-stick shooter into the bargain), can summon an army of customised rats to eat/explode on his enemies, is able to create shockwaves to stun his foes and even conjure an arcane dome to inflict damage over time.

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Scarlet however, is one of the most interesting characters Ravenswatch has to offer by far. By day, she’s a red hood wearing, dagger wielding, rogue-style archetype, blending together fierce melee combos with lightning fast charges and damaging bombs that can be readily flung at her foes. When night arrives however, she changes wholesale into a towering, bloodthirsty werewolf complete with an all-new array of rage-focused melee attacks, stomps and AoE strikes that truly make her feel like two characters in one. Even with the rest of the roster unlocked, she was my favourite hero by far.

Beyond its heroes and Lovecraftian bosses, Ravenswatch also offers up a pleasingly wide variety of regular enemies for players to scrap with. From scraggy goblins to huge spiders, corrupted phoenixes, polearm wielding pig-men, towering cyclops and so much more besides, Ravenswatch has a tremendous cast of villains on show, that’s for sure.

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Like any roguelike offering worth its salt, Ravenswatch also provides no shortage of progression for players outside of each playthrough. Not only does each character possess their own meta progression experience bars, which gain XP after each run unlocking new ability upgrades in turn, but pages are also written into each of their well-voiced back stories too, providing players with ample insight into who they are and how they became tangled up with all of this mess in the first place.

For folk with a penchant for obsessive build-speccing on a per run basis, Ravenswatch allows this in spades, too. Even though each run is governed by procedural design, resulting in different upgrades and skill branches, the gold fragments that you can accumulate by destroying gold crystals can be used to purchase a set number of different skills from different branches. This is all thanks to the Sandman who acts as a vendor of sorts for you to turn your gold into something more tangibly useful.

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It’s certainly worth noting that Ravenswatch can be played in solo or with friends via crossplay, though there are a couple of caveats built around this. The first is that it’s very much true that the game presents much a steeper challenge in solo play when compared to cooperative play. However, the flipside of this is that each player shares a single pile of Raven’s Feathers (essentially lives) with their partners in violence, impressing upon each of them the need to not waste health and end up depleting that pool unnecessarily.

Where Ravenswatch comes a little unstuck is in the question of content. With just three biomes in the current build of the game, it’s fair to say that relative lack of environment and enemy variety begins to grate.

A Relative Lack Of Content Takes Some Sheen Off Of The Overall Package

Speaking of lacking variety, the Master Nightmare boss which appears at the end of each biome though mechanically different, doesn’t really have an especially remarkable visual design – just looking like a big, purple monster with tentacles, a maw and really that’s it for the most part. I mean obviously, you would expect such grotesque designs owing to its Lovecraftian influences, but equally given those influences, it’s also true that there is also a wider selection of designs that developer Passtech Games could have pulled from.

Something else which shows a lack of imagination are the side quests. Though the ones that are there are largely fine, there just isn’t enough of them to provide sufficient variety in order to prevent a cloying sense of over familiarity from creeping in and so doing them becomes a little more grating than it otherwise perhaps would.

Ravenswatch has the hard stuff nailed down – the combat is sophisticated, the roguelike mechanics are spot-on and there is no shortage of progression avenues and opportunities; it just needs more content than it currently has to really shine. As it is, Ravenswatch is a roguelike overflowing with innovation and potential, it just needs a bit more content to turn a very good experience into a great one.

Ravenswatch is out now on PS4, PS5 and PS5 Pro.

Review code kindly provided by PR.

Score

8.5

The Final Word

Ravenswatch has the hard stuff nailed down - the combat is sophisticated, the roguelike mechanics are spot-on and there is no shortage of progression avenues and opportunities; it just needs more content than it currently has to really shine. As it is, Ravenswatch is a roguelike overflowing with innovation and potential, it just needs a bit more content to turn a very good experience into a great one.