Raven Squad taught me never to make assumptions based around a name alone. As I popped the disk into my Xbox 360, I was quickly deflated after realizing that this wasn’t the That’s So Raven MMO that I had been yearning for. Feeling dejected, I soon took solace in a game that looked to breathe some fresh air into the stale, rotting lungs of the military-combat genre. Instead of sticking to first-person shooting alone, Raven Squad also offers a real-time strategy-esque aerial perspective mode that - at the touch of a button - allows the player to take command over their troops and move them at will via an on-screen icon. This seemed like a revelation to me at the time, as I began to have visions of a Halo game that would let me send an army of Warthogs charging towards the enemy fleet before seamlessly switching back to first-person mode and sniping a daftly exposed Grunt. As the possibilities began to spin around my head like a cat that has fallen into the washing machine, my hopes and dreams were quickly harpooned back to reality after pressing the start button.

Raven Squad puts the player in charge of two independent squads, each of which has three soldiers. All six of your guys have one regular weapon (machine guns, shotguns) and one special weapon (rocket launchers, grenades) at their disposal, making the player frantically switch between characters as they get swarmed with enemies. Since the squads can be sent in different directions at the same time, Raven Squad offers the aforementioned RTS view to make commanding these soldiers a bit easier. This opens up quite a few tactical maneuvers that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, as you can see where the enemies are hiding, locate the objective points, and even find back routes into an area to flank unsuspecting foes. Unfortunately, the in-game execution of these ideas left me a sad, broken man.

Raven Squad’s problems are brought to the surface immediately thanks to the game’s feebleminded artificial intelligence. Your fellow squad members will often choose to admire the foliage while happily absorbing bullets, never thinking that the nearby cover would be a more comfortable spot to stand. They also never consider the fact that you might need help in mowing down the legions of adversaries raining gunfire on your location, leaving you to fend for yourself most of the time. These issues render the RTS mode useless, as relying on the AI to take out your opponents will often leave most of your squad lying in an awkward pile on the poorly textured dirt. Once that happens, the player has sixty seconds to rejuvenate their ailing allies, as AI-controller soldiers have little to no interest in helping each other up. They also have no desire to move unless you tell them where to go, so expect to see half of your team snoozing at the previous objective unless you hop into RTS mode and set them straight.

Also problematic is the level design, as nearly every area feels identical to the one before it. Most objectives force the player to clear out an enemy base or defend a group of civilians, with the only challenge coming from the occasional armored vehicle or grenade-happy soldier. Even the final boss (an evil truck!) is a letdown, as the single-player campaign wraps up after four to five hours of unremarkable gunplay. There is also no competitive multiplayer to speak of, with Raven Squad’s only online offering being the ability to beat the game cooperatively with a buddy. While some of the partner AI problems are solved by having another person command one of the squads, the shooting is still bland and there is no one playing it online.

One thing that I did enjoy about Raven Squad is the presentation, which is downright hilarious at times. The constant cycle of jungle and village scenarios are rarely appealing, and the character models look like they were built for Quake III. Trees and bodies will occasionally fade into and out of existence, and you can sometimes walk through solid objects — like cars — for no apparent reason. Along with that comes the voice acting, which can only be described as impeccably awesome. Each line of dialogue sounds like it was recorded after the actor’s midday nap, with zero inflection and some of the best/worst accents ever pressed onto a disk. The squad leader might be the greatest of them all, exclaiming “I’m being shot at!” with emotion normally reserved for a price check at a local Pathmark.

Raven Squad could have been a cool mash-up of two long-standing genres, but the AI problems, repetition, poor level design and awkward presentation keep this bird from flying as high as it should. With so many great military shooters available on the Xbox 360, it’s hard to recommend Raven Squad to anybody that hasn’t already beaten everything else like it. And if you have beaten everything else, why not try a racing game?

Gameplay: 4.0
The first-person shooting is functional, but the real-time strategy elements are janky and unusable. Switching between characters — all of which are identical aside from their weapons — feels like an unnecessarily complicated way to vary up the gameplay.

Graphics: 3.5 
To say that Raven Squad isn’t the prettiest girl at the dance wouldn’t quite encompass it all. Plain design, robotic facial animation, boring environments and glitchy animation are just a few of its more regular issues.

Sound: 4.0
I really wanted to score this higher because of the laugh-out-loud voice acting, but I don’t think that it was intended to play that way. The generic instrumental score and gun-centric sound effects do the job.

Difficulty: Medium
The AI is incredibly dumb, to the point that your squad mates will sometimes stand out in the open and let themselves die. If you can wrangle the RTS mode long enough to position them before every fight, you should breeze through Raven Squad in a handful of hours without much difficulty.

Concept: 6.0
As a pure concept, Raven Squad’s blending of first-person shooting and real-time strategy aspects is a solid idea that might one day yield a good game. Unfortunately, the execution here is so poor that you won’t get any enjoyment out of it.

Multiplayer: 4.0
While the game lacks any type of competitive multiplayer, the entire campaign of Raven Squad can be played cooperatively over Xbox Live. The only problem is that no one is playing it.

Overall:  3.7
Raven Squad is a monotonous, short and somewhat ugly FPS that is hard to recommend to anyone that isn’t looking for the interactive equivalent of a Steven Seagal flick.