1.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Ravenlok.
Ravenlok is really mediocre, it's the type of game that feels like it wanted to do something cool, but either didn't have the budget or the talent to execute it properly. Every moment of this game feels at odds with itself, whether it be the art style, the counter intuitive leveling system, or the mediocre combat, it all just doesn't work. The art style doesn't know if it wants to go for full voxel environments or something more stylized, so it ends up using this weird combination of both. Sometimes this game looks really pretty, and other times not so much, a lot of the environment feels kind of at odds with itself and I wish it doubled down on the voxel style more over what we got. The lighting and reflections in this game are top notch, if I could praise this game for anything it would be how pretty this game can be at points.
The level progression and structure of this game is weird. Instead of fighting enemies and gaining XP like a normal game, you gain a certain item that lets you upgrade your character. It's not an automatic process, and most of the time you have to go way out of your way just to make sure you're able to level up so you can still do a good amount of damage. It just seems like an extra step that wasn't needed, but that honestly fits with how the rest of this game feels. Ravenlok is a giant fetch quest, you go to one NPC, they tell you what to bring them, you find someone else that'll give you that item and rinse and repeat. I kid you not, you do this for every quest in the game, sometimes you'll be thrown into a room with enemies or have to fight a boss, but at the end of the day it's still just go get this item and bring it back over and over again. Usually game's that have missions like this would lock it behind a side quest or something, but this is the entire main story of Ravenlok, you hardly do anything else.
The only other thing you do in this game is fight enemies, and my god is the combat boring. Every single encounter you button mash and occasionally dodge until the enemy is dead, over the course of the game you'll be able to use special abilities that have a cool down, but that's about the extent of combat. Every enemy and boss dies so quickly that it feels like nobody behind the scenes of this game actually played it. I can't imagine a developer playing this game and saying "yeah this is good", it's so mind numbingly boring that if I didn't know beforehand that this game was super short, I probably would have stopped playing. Do not buy this game, it is not worth it and even if you have gamepass and want to play it for free, I'd still say don't bother.