Ravenfield is a fun and free single-player Battlefield-style shooter

I've been playing Ravenfield, a free FPS I found on Itch.io, and I've been playing it so much it's been difficult to stop playing for long enough to write about it. I love when that happens.

Ravenfield is Battlefield-style shooter, with team Blue versus team Red. Though it's single-player only, you fight alongside scores of AI friendlies and attempt to secure control of five capture points on an island. There are helicopters, jeeps, and boats, and your choice of loadout weapons like a sniper rifle, AK-47, and shotgun. Sure, the characters are blocky, single color shapes, but they do ragdoll quite satisfyingly as you'll see in the gifs on this page.

According to Ravenfield's creator, SteelRaven7: "It started out as an experiment with ragdolls and AI, and will remain a slightly experimental, for-fun game project."

I've played a few matches, and though not everything works perfectly—the AI get stuck sometimes, and I spent quite a while flopping around in the ocean after crashing a chopper because swimming doesn't work that well—it's still a complete hoot. The gameplay and goals are pretty simple, as explained on the Itch.io page:

"The objective of the game is to beat your enemy team's score by 200 points. Do this by capturing flags and murderizing enemies. Besides providing additional spawn points, each flag your team holds increases your Flag Multiplier. This multiplier increases the score you gain per enemy kill. The team score bars indicate what team is currently winning, push out the enemy bar to win the game! You can also win the game by capturing all spawn points."

Plus, it really does feel like Battlefield. My squadmates will all jump in a car or chopper and split without me. And, on the rare occasion I do get into a chopper, I almost immediately crash. That's about how my experience in Battlefield games goes too, so I feel right at home.

I appreciate that the AI can be bamboozled, too. They're not operating with psychic powers, as I found when I climbed into a boat, circled the island, and came up to a capture point from behind. Those boxy Reds were completely unaware I was there, and I was able to capture the point after taking some of them down.

Ravenfield is free, and you should really pick it up.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.