There were a few moments during my playthrough of R.A.W. Realms of Ancient War where I really couldn’t decide if I was enjoying the game. And for about 80-percent of the game, the answer to that was no.
It’s a weird thing, especially when it comes to Action RPG’s. It’s almost the same conundrum as the old school beat-em-ups of yore. What makes one button masher better than another? Granted, in the realm of ARPG’s there are a few things that can make one game stand above others. RAW, unfortunately, doesn’t do any of them.
It’s not that RAW is ultimately bad, but it’s just really, really boring. The camera is pulled back so far from the action you can barely make out what your character looks like, much less feel engaged with the combat itself. To make matters worse, there is zero, I repeate ZERO feedback for combat. There is no crunch to combat, no satisfying punch to the blows you are landing. There is nothing. Your button presses don’t result in anything more than watching numbers fly off of enemies until they decide to fall over and die. Bosses and special enemies do have a health bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen every once in a while, but hacking away at them again gives little to no feedback as you watch their health bar deplete a little at a time, until it’s all gone.
Or until you die, which will happen with very little warning, since that lack of feedback carries over to the damage done to the player character as well. If the player is not staring at their health bar, they likely won’t know they’re taking damage. And the damage they take can pile up in a hurry, since the player is constantly swarmed by enemies, both weak and strong. RAW throws a mixture of enemies at the player at any given time. Sometimes its a sprinkling of stronger enemies that the player can take care of one at a time, or a swarm of small spiders or skeletons that are numerous, but don’t deal a ton of damage. These two types, when dealt with singularly, aren’t that big of a deal, but when the game throws both at the player, which it does often, the gameplay devolves quickly as the player is too busy running away from the hordes in order to take out the baddie that is actually doing the heavy damage before they die a quick and painful death.
Speaking of death, most ARPG’s work on a save system or a character progression system that remains consistent despite whether the character dies or not. For example, if my character is level 14 and halfway to the next level, with an inventory full of loot, and they die, they’ll respawn somewhere and have to retread, but they’ll still have the items and most of, if not all, the experience they’ve accumulated thus far. RAW works on a system akin to a beat em up or a platformer. The player has a number of jewels, which are basically “lives” and every time they die, they’ll respawn at the latest checkpoint glyph they’ve activated. But if the player dies enough times to run out of jewels, its effectively Game Over, and time to restart the level from the beginning, sans everything the player has earned and collected. It’s… aggravating. Death can come so fast and furious that losing jewels to bogus low-rate enemies happens, and happens often. It really sucks losing your last life to a handful of spiders.
It wouldn’t be that big of a deal if the very spirit of an ARPG was left intact. But it isn’t. The essence of an ARPG (or any RPG for that matter) is that if a character isn’t strong enough to survive an encounter, keep playing and eventually they will be. That’s the very DNA of an action rpg. THAT’S WHY WE PLAY.
But RAW not only strips the player of everything they’ve earned, it also hamstrings their ability to level up to make sure they don’t get strong enough. I suppose it was a way for the developers to balance the game, but in doing so it removes the purpose of the combat entirely. The player fights to get stronger. But in RAW, once the character has reached the level the developers balanced for, the game literally halts XP growth (or makes the XP earned so insignificant, you won’t level up anyway). At first I thought it was my imagination, but after paying attention, it was painfully obvious that my XP bar literally stopped moving, and it wouldn’t resume again until I had reached the next level. That’s… kinda bullshit to be honest. Why even have an XP bar at all? Just balance the game through loot, if you want to. Cap the gear that you can find (which they also do). If I’m in a low level area, obviously I’m going to get low level gear. That’s a given that we’ve all come to expect. So to get the low level gear AND stop leveling up removes what it means to be an RPG.
Am I getting too worked up over this? Possibly.
Did it affect my ability to enjoy the game? Absolutely.
The graphics were decent, and the story was… honestly I don’t even remember the story. But do we ever? I loved Diablo but I couldn’t tell you even kind of what it was about. But it was that disconnect, both with the distance from the action and the lack of impact in the combat, that ultimately made getting through RAW a bit of a chore. I just wasn’t interested. The game was relatively short, compared to other ARPGs, but I found myself only playing it for a few minutes at a time, whereas I can sit down with an excellent game like Grim Dawn or Diablo and lose myself for hours.
I guess I should also mention that I played solo, so maybe that made a difference as well. The game was apparently balanced for co-op, which is great, but let’s be real here… the game probably never had a huge audience to begin with, and getting someone to play it with you in this day and age either requires bribery or a really, really good friend. The fact that it’s balanced for two players is pointed out through their “hints” like recommending both players choose different play styles like melee and ranged. But what if I’m alone? Now I need to account for both melee and ranged. In most games, that’s taken care of through special abilities and magic and here it’s no different, they’re just not all that powerful (probably due to the aforementioned stunting of the character’s growth.)
That being said, I can’t see playing co-op being the saving grace, as a lot of my gripes are both mechanical and structurally based. That wouldn’t magically changed with the addition of a second character.
Now, at the beginning of the article, I said “80-percent” of the time. That other twenty-percent comes at the tail end of the game, when the player hits character level 20 and unlocks abilites that actually make the game fun. I legitimately enjoyed the end of the game, because by then my character unlocked abilities that significantly increased her survivability, along with a wolf summoning spell that let her level the field in seconds. It was grand, and I loved it. Finally, I was rocking. Then the game ended. I looked to see if there was a New Game Plus, but sadly, there was none to be found. I mentioned above that the character is only allowed to level up so much before they get capped and have to progress to the next level, so there is literally no way to unlock these abilities earlier in the game. They saved the best for the very last, and that’s annoying as hell, because those abilities would’ve made the game so, so much more fun had they been available earlier. And that’s really unfortunate.
Okay. I have spent far more time talking about this game than I really feel it deserves, so I’m going to end this here. I have many, many more of these games to get to, some of them much more worthy of my time. Play RAW if you want, it won’t scar you. But it won’t feel like a fulfilling time/money investment, either.
