This is a greate game. so much fun. the only problem for me was that, you could not just buy one thing=galactic adventures. I have to de authorise my other computer to get it to work on my other mac. (other computer is not mine) and i have no idea how to de authorise it. Help would be good.

OK, let me preface this review with a quick statement.... no, this game is not as in depth or as polished as Oblivion/Skyrim though it is obviously inspired by it. But you know what... Having played through the entire game, sidequests and all, it is still quite fun to play and even to look at in some respects. I think I had lowered my expectations when I saw this game had been reworked for Mac. The game was great on iOS, but a lot of that has to do with the expectations of the hardware. It could be said that Ravensword: Shadowlands is a great technical achievement on iOS, but a bit of a technical mishap on OSX. No matter what though, the game is a good deal for $12.99 USD in my opinion. Let's get into the review categories.

GRAPHICS
OK, there are points of the game at which the vistas look great and easily impress. You have to remember that this game is an iOS game reworked for the Mac. With that in mind, you may have a fresh approach to Ravensword: Shadowloands. You can change the draw distance which will help the game on some slower Macs. With this draw distance all the way up, you can see quite far, but you still see some draw-in in the distance. But it does not really affect the gameplay. A bunch of strange things do appear throughout the game though. A lot of glitches, walking through walls, missing polygonal edges, floating trees and other objects, strange objects high in the sky in South Aven, and some others. But if you can look past these, there is a lot to enjoy in the graphics department. Normal mapping is used to its fullest in the environments, creatures and people of the Ravensword universe which does make the game look more next-gen, or in this case, present-gen. But all in all the graphics do their job.

SOUND
The soundtrack is very well done for a smaller game. The music fits the atmosphere at most times, but does feel strange sometimes in certain circumstances. The creatures all have the sounds you would probably expect. There is some voice-over work for the NPC's, but most of the dialogue throughout the game is text. It would have been great to have this enhanced for the Mac version, but understandably, this would have been almost impossible and cost more. The weapon sounds are well done, but a bit shallow. The ambient sounds are also well done in some areas and others seem a bit too bland. This is where the music can help out.

GAMEPLAY
This is where some people will be having a problem. I will try my best to project the gameplay issues realistically. The gameplay in Ravensword is in broad scope, fine. But the little details are definitely missed here. It is very easy to get around, fight and traverse the landscapes. But you will find that some strange things can happen. I have walked through walls and fallen through others, jumped my way up a mountain just to fall through a false floor and I have even been stuck inside a Dino Cow after killing it. Yes, these are the things you will encounter when playing Ravensword for OSX. One issue that has followed from the iOS version is the loot waiting time. After killing a creature, you have to wait a few seconds, sometimes 3-5 seconds for the green loot effect to become visible letting you know that you can now loot your fallen enemy. This may seem like only an annoyance, but when you are slaying creatures quickly, it really causes an issue. You will find yourself killing a group of enemies first, then returning to loot them almost in the order you killed them to get the best timing. And this does work well if you can get it right. Also, the inventory menu, in which you can equip and enhance your character and his items, is poorly done. Clicking and dragging to find items is not very efficient in this case. Also, there are times where items will overlap each other in the menu causing some initial frustration. One other point here is the "buying a home" portion of the game. If you want to do everything in the game, you can buy a home and even furnish it. I did this and found it to be very disappointing. Dropping the items and moving them is not practical and should have been addressed in my opinion. But it is a side project in the game, so it is something that can be forgiven.

STORY
The story of Ravensword, though fairly basic, is well done. The side quests, though smaller in scope, are a nice diversion from the main quest and there are quite a few of them to keep you busy. I found myself wanting to finish the current quest to get to the next one. The storytelling is not very in-depth, but it gets the job done. I was interested to know what happened and what was going to happen next.

OVERALL
For the $12.99 USD price tag, you get a game that tries to emulate what some other RPG's have successfully portrayed. It does that, but in a very limited role. I could not give this game five stars as I do not believe it warrants it, but it definitely earns the four in my opinion. There is a lot to like in Ravensword: Shadowlands, but there is a lot that could have been much better. With a bit more time and polish, this OSX port could be a very good game. In its current released state, the game is a nice Oblivion/Skyrim wannabe that I think you will enjoy. Just be careful where you explore or you may end up falling through the ground ;)

I do not usually have time to play games and have not played since the Balduer's Gate game (a few years ago). But I had a little down time and decided to try this. It is interesting and fun. I played it on standard mode, and found it to be challenging but because maxed out my fire sign, near the end of the game it got a bit to easy.

That being said, it was/is good fun and I am buying the next instalment. The reason for the 4 rather 5 stars is that it crashes to much (especially in some areas) entering new scenes, etc.

I have a pretty good mac.
MacBook Pro
Retina, Mid 2012
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7
Memory 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB

So I wonder how it would be a a lower spec mac. BUT save opften and enjoy, it was fina nd for $10, it is a deal. You definitley will get your money's worth!

I downloaded the demo and tried the first level on easy. With the amount of gold coins they give you it's extremely hard to beat the first stage. I don't take issue with the game being hard, but it' the first stage. Give people a chance to ease in and feel like we are doing a good job then hit us with an absurd amount of enemies.

Also, most tower defense games have a similar formula; hit the enemy at the head of the line. The dart towers in this game will randomly turn and shoot other enemies behind the leader when the leader is clearly in the radius of the tower. That is frustrating.

The problems are enough for me to pass on this.

This game has no support by publisher, if you happen to have the 'units invisible' bug that's quite common noone will even bother responding to questions wtf

So many things wrong with this game, and not just the terrible server issues.

The traffic simulation remains badly broken.

Sims constantly complain about lack of shops, parks, jobs, police, transport links, water, power, you name it, when there's plenty of all of them.

The space you're given to make cities in is tiny, a fraction of what it was in every previous game.

And you can't save the game then destroy it with aliens and re-load the old save, which was half the fun.

A shadow of the game it used to be, and that's assuming you can get into a server.

The end of SimCity, for me.