When I was a kid, I used to spend countless hours playing the original Star Wars: Battlefront on my dad’s Playstation 2. I didn’t have a lot of exposure to video games back then, so in my little head, Battlefront was the quintessential gaming experience; quick, large scale battles between the armies in Star Wars that put you on the ground, blasting down waves of stormtroopers or battle droids or whatever else with all sorts of characters, weapons, vehicles, points to capture, the whole shebang. I loved it to pieces, and to this day, I’ll still pick it up every once and a while to give it a go. 

Since my youth, I’ve never managed to find a game that was as easy to pick up and play and kept me as engaged as Battlefront did. The modern multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield always fell short, either because of long load times or frustration in being forced to play competitively, something I don’t excel at due to a lack of real skill in video games.

Enter Ravenfield, the solution to all my problems. Created by SteelRaven7, this one-man work in progress is a shooter in the same vein as my old Star Wars: Battlefront game, but if you’re familiar with the Battlefield series, you’ll get the gist: large battle, lots of soldiers, vehicles, etc. Capture points on the map to advance and don’t run out of reinforcements. There are a few things that differ Ravenfield from other shooters in its category, however. Where Battlefield, Battlefront, Call of Duty, and any other mainstream team-based game strives to create a well-balanced experience that all players can feel like they have a chance in, Ravenfield says “screw it.” This is largely because Ravenfield is a single-player only experience, and that’s bound to turn a few players away, but there’s enough in Ravenfield that those willing to give it a go will find themselves hooked. The simplicity in Ravenfield’s design means that the limit to how many combatants you can have in a battle is entirely dependent on your computer: my fairly standard gaming laptop was easily able to handle 300 bots running around the screen and more if I was okay with a little framerate stutter here and there. As alluded to, Ravenfield also lets you choose how balanced those unlimited soldiers are on each team, letting you create some real David vs. Goliath moments if you choose. The most fun I’ve had so far in Ravenfield has been trying to lead a ragtag group of soldiers through a small tunnel, where an entire battalion of soldiers and tanks and machine guns fired volley after volley into us. Everything in Ravenfield works well enough to let these moments shine; the AI is capable of handling itself in a fight, the shooting is solid, if not a little light, the maps are massive and varied, if not in need of detail. There are enough game modes to play around with as well, but I found myself sticking mostly to Domination, a capture the zones a-la Battlefield/Battlefront and Skirmish, a scaled-down version of Domination that severely limited the reinforcements of each side. Ravenfield also supports mods, and a large fanbase means there’s always a new map, new guns, or new looks to play around with. While it’s still in Early Access on Steam, the roadmap at the main menu suggests most of the content intended for launch is there, and good enough, because Ravenfield is a blast. Oh, to be a kid again!