Though the crumbling, war-torn look of Ravaged's maps is intriguing, and items like tennis ball bombs and bats bristling with nails mesh well with the post-apocalyptic motif, little effort is made to explain why Paris is a frozen wasteland on one map and on another the Statue of Liberty is in pieces. It's not really essential for an online shooter to make a point of explaining its fiction, but considering the setting is really one of Ravaged's defining characteristics, it feels like more could have been done, even something as simple as text blurbs on the class selection menu to develop more of a sense of personality.
Ravaged’s strengths emerge when you’re on a big map in a multi-seat vehicle firing roof-mounted grenade launchers while someone blasts machine guns from the passenger seat and another steers around debris, rocky outcroppings and incoming explosives. It’s even more exciting when you coordinate with teammates to form roving, death-dealing packs of four-wheelers and buggies and Mad Max-style cars, turbo-boost toward objectives and obliterate all opposition along the way in big, fiery blasts. Moments like these are easily reproduced and the highlights of any session of Ravaged.
While the controls for land-based vehicles, although stiff, shouldn't be too tough to get used to, your first few flights through the sky in an air vehicle will likely end with your rotor blades upside-down and on fire as you slam against a rock face. The flying vehicles’ challenging controls exemplify how Ravaged combines arcade-like accessibility with depth. Learning to soar across a battlefield and shoot explosives at the enemy team while avoiding return fire feels rewarding, both because it’s a satisfying challenge to quickly and simultaneously move and aim, and because it can have a noticeable effect on your team’s success.
2 Dawn adds more depth with weapons like the sniper rifle and rocket launcher, both of which feature projectile drops over long distances. This means more skill is required to score long-distance shots. You can’t simply jump up onto a high point and easily gun down everything that runs below you. Tagging someone seated in a speeding buggy’s turret by predicting exactly where to aim can be hugely satisfying -- the type of surprising moment that encourages you to continue to log in and try to replicate it.
Even with the special considerations you need to take into account when attacking from afar, the class design in Ravaged is so derivative it’s tough to really get excited about playing one role over the other. There’s the rocket guy, the submachine guy, the assault rifle guy, the heavy weapons guy and the sniper. Some make it easier to blow up vehicles and some excel at close-range combat, and it all feels very familiar. There’s a limited amount of weapon loadout customization by design. Ravaged isn’t a game that incorporates on grindy unlock systems, which suits the fast gameplay mildly reminiscent of Unreal Tournament’s gleeful over-the-top nonsense. Still, Ravaged needs to do more to make its on-foot shooting mechanics stand out. If you've played any kind of online first-person shooter before, you won’t find any creative takes on old class design ideas in 2 Dawn’s game.
The play modes of base control and capture the flag are just as genre-standard as the classes. They serve their purpose of giving you reasons to team up and coordinate, but offer little that’s unique. You’ll bunch up with teammates to attack and take over territory as well as form strike squads to grab the flag (called fuel in Ravaged) from the enemy base while some stay behind to defend. The larger maps are filled with hiding spots in between rocks and on top of tall structures, so there’s some room to come up with defense solutions aside from just crowding around a capture point with weapons ready. You can hide in buildings, conceal turret-equipped vehicles behind walls or drop to a prone position on a faraway tower with a sniper rifle, which makes map knowledge valuable, but unfortunately also gives spawn campers a lot of ways to stay out of sight. 2 Dawn also included smaller maps without vehicles presumably to add more variety, but when the most distinctive elements of Ravaged are removed, the flaws are all the more obvious.
At the very least, 2 Dawn ensures there’s little downtime in each play session with its spawn system. You can spawn into any bases under your team’s control, spawn into empty seats in friendly vehicles driving around, and can spawn right next to any players in your squad so can more easily keep the pressure on the opposing team. It shows that Ravaged has some of the right components to eventually turn into a great multiplayer experience, but for now feels like it was released too early.
