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Raven: Interactive DVD Game
"Test your wisdom and tenacity as you battle your way through Demon Square, Burning Battlements, Serpent’s Eye and the Enchanted Stream in this interactive game." How does it work? Well, you can play alone or with up to four players. You then answer two either/or questions to determine your warrior name and your standard, which is quite good fun. You pick one of three paths, each with a differing number of challenges (which appear to be picked at random). You are gifted with a different amount of feathers (representing lives) depending on which path you take, and similarly you require different amounts of treasure rings to gain back a life. It's just like the TV show! For each game, Raven gives a brief introduction, then you have the option of looking at the rules or diving straight into it. This continues until the final game, The Last Stand, where the winner is the person who completes the task in the fastest time, unless nobody manages to complete it within the alloted time (determined by the amount of lives you have left). Is it good? It actually gets across the spirit of Raven quite well, with one very important caveat - if your DVD player is old, there's a good chance you're going to have problems. We tried it on two different set ups, and didn't manage to get a perfectly working game on either of them. And that's a shame, because there's some quite clever stuff happening. There appears to be a pool of about ten games (or rather, we've played through several times and that's what we've seen). Some of them, like the Riddle Bridge (just like the TV show, cross the bridge by finding the correct word), Demon Square (answer true or false questions from The Wisdom Tree) and the Enchanted Stream (piece together a bridge bit by bit by selecting the correct pieces before the river engulfs you. Nice mist effect!) work very well, whilst games like Serpent's Eye (hit "enter" when the crosshair moves to the centre of the target), the Spider's Tunnel (use arrow keys to move through a stationary and not very interesting maze before the time runs out) and Demon's Causeway (move onto squares, hope the DVD player likes you) are not. We had one repeat question from The Wisdom tree in the few times we played it. The interesting games are the ambitious ones which use your menu cursor as a representative in an action game, like The Way of the Warrior and The Last Stand. In theory these are great ideas - you attempt to move through, but if you mistime your arrow pressing and hit a moving obstacle you lose a life and get sent back to the beginning - but are highly dependant on your DVD player not playing up. It's astonishing that this version of The Last Stand, where you attempt to put together a key against a tight time limit and Nevar's lightning bolts, is better than any version they've had on TV yet. It's not quite like the show, when you play multi-player the only time when you play against each other is at The Last Stand, The Way of the Warrior is a test everyone has to do. This is a pity. You're really just playing the one player game but several times through. The game is well presented and takes plenty of the music and graphics from the show. James Mackenzie reprises his role as Raven here, guiding and chiding with style, but it's a pity he only seems to have filmed about three different ways of saying "let's go to the next challenge". In summary, this is a pretty neat DVD game that's had more thought put into than most. Possibly it's a bit too clever for it's own good in places. |
The Amazon blurb says: