Ravensword: The Fallen King strikes a delicate balance between an adventure game with a humorous, if a little predictable storyline, and an role-playing, stat based game. For fans of the latter, they may find the lack of customisation options disappointing, and certainly the absence of a skill tree or statistic tweaking may lead others to not enjoy the game as much as a more complicated title.

However, for us managing skill points and a mass of various character attributes is a turn off. Which is why Ravensword is so refreshing—you can jump into the game for as much or as little as you want, hit the home button and go do something else. Death also carries no punishment, other than to return you back home and lose where you were on the map. It’s true that there are only two types of armour, and only a handful of weapons throughout the game too, but the crucial thing is that it doesn’t matter.

You see, every time we come across a negative for this title, it’s overwhelmed by a positive. There’s minor niggles like the (eventually) large list of items that are somewhat sluggish to scroll through that’s forgiven for the hilarious textual descriptions, for when you’re feeling stabby. The camera look, even with sensitivity turned up to full never feels just right—but panning around the environment conveys such a sheer sense of scale and wonder that it’s hard to fault the game on it. Even though you notice flaws in this title it compels you to play it through, to discover the open world and the various side quests that lie within.

What else would keep us playing the game? Despite minor flaws, the controls are extremely slick, with the analog stick and touch buttons complementing the look anywhere mechanic. Targeting enemies is slightly fiddly, but most of the time you’ll see them coming and have time to tap on them to get the green cross-hairs. Other times they’ll come up behind you, which is frustrating. Disappointingly, for one of the side missions the horse controls are rather cumbersome, and it’s only by sheer fluke did we manage to herd the sheep into the pen. Fortunately this quest is an optional extra.

We don’t want to really spoil the plot lines but there’s some great moments in there—the McDonald’s satirising we found particularly piquant, but suffice to say that it’s all good. All told, we played through around six hours before deciding to write this review, and that included some level grinding and completing the full game. But there’s plenty of side missions to do, and simply exploring the open world is fun on its own. Without the burden of caring about low health or getting to a save point, you are liberated to do as you please.

Even on the slowest first generation iPod touch, the game ran optimally. Like in many PC games, you have options to speed up the game experience, by turning off the details—more specifically, shadows and foliage. We noticed the most slowdown in the home town hub, but it wasn’t detrimental to the game’s overall experience. Indeed, the game didn’t even flinch when playing alongside iPod music.

So moving onto the gameplay itself, you’ll start small with clubbing rats in exchange for gold pieces, and eventually get strong enough to take on some of the more challenging missions. Even though the game doesn’t penalise death, we recommend that as soon as you’re killing gold carrying foes that you stock up on honeycombs, as they give you a huge health boost for only 25 gold. The food plates aren’t worth the trouble.

The bulk of the game focuses on killing foes for gold, and then using that gold to buy new weapons and items that you need to take down the harder foes. Magic isn’t really a huge deal in Ravensword, and so much of the combat is about being stronger than your opponent, using the toughest weapon that you can find, and making judicious use of the pause menu system so that you can heal large chunks of health with honeycombs. To that end, there is some level grinding to be done which will help you get through the game quicker.

The central town of Aven acts as a portal to the other areas of the map, with tall, looming gates that give a slight hint about where you’re going next. The main map doesn’t offer a lot of detail about exactly where you are, just your rough location. However it’s rather trivial finding your way around, for the most part—and as you can warp to Aven at any point it makes backtracking after completing a quest a thing of the past.

Make sure to peruse through our screenshot gallery and watch the above trailer, because the game is extremely good looking. The only qualm we have with it is the draw distance is very short, and so you get a foggy appearance for many of the game’s levels. But you expect that from an open world game rather than a fixed path title, and whilst many of the levels are linear they are huge. From the cavernous tower in Sytheria to the sprawling Meadowlands and claustrophobic Graveyard setting, each level has its own presence that makes exploring it a joy. The background ambiance and music changes from area to area too, so we’re happy to say that the developers did the right thing by not being lazy and only including one music track to loop through the entire game.

There is a lot here to love. We’re not about to gloss over the failings of the game—yes there are a few gimmies including experience gained from enemies falling off cliffs or into lava, and other moments that you can cheat by not triggering the dialogue when you should. And the aforementioned flaws (like the camera movement) did bug us when playing. But as we mentioned before, the experience of simply playing the game is fantastic. If you said a year ago that you’d be able to buy fully fledged role-playing games for $6.99 we would have thought you were joking. That is why Ravensword is such a gem. It brings a terrific, simplified 3D RPG experience to mobile and that alone is enough to give it our highest recommendation.

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