When I first started using a PC for gaming, all I had was a little PC that my dad had built for me and my sister to do schoolwork on. We had limited access to the internet at the time, so on a rare occasion when we did, I went looking around for games to play. I poked around on Gamejolt, and ran into a little FPS that promised a multiplayer-esque experience in a single player game. The graphics were primitive, so I was sure it could run on our computer, and best of all I didn't need to be online to play it.

That game was a very old alpha of Ravenfield. It had strange AI, two maps, and a handful of guns to choose from. It was the first FPS I ever played with a mouse and keyboard (save for one time I played Red Eclipse and Assault Cube on my uncle's laptop), and I played it for countless hours.

Some years later, I learned that Ravenfield had advanced far beyond what I had been playing. I eventually bought my own gaming laptop, and the first thing I did was install Steam and buy Ravenfield, to see what it had become.

Ravenfield is an entirely single player game that strives to behave like a multiplayer game. Rather than play through a series of levels in a campaign, Ravenfield places you onto wide, open map with with two teams of AI controlled players in a multiplayer-style game mode. This, on paper, sounds quite odd. Usually, bots are included in an FPS as an afterthought for when you don't have anyone else to play with. But in Ravenfield, playing against bots is the entire game. This, as it turns out, works amazingly well for a whole variety of reasons, and serves to create a very unique experience:

A: You can have as many (or as few) players as you want, and balance the teams however you want. If you so desire, you can have battles bigger than you could ordinarily achieve with real humans. The only limit is the strength of your computer.

B: There is no pressure to take things seriously. This, combined with the sandbox nature of the game, can lead to a lot of fun. You want to grab a helicopter and attempt to use it just to kamikaze one individual enemy? No reason you can't. The AI aren't going to get mad at you for wasting resources, (and vehicles respawn quite quickly, so they are quite expendable). No matter how you play, neither you nor the AI have any reason to get upset.

Now, this alone will get old eventually, so going into playing this game, I HIGHLY recommend that you download lots and lots of mods. The single best thing about this game is the huge modding community around it. Is there a real world (or even fictional) gun you like? Nine times out of ten you can find a decent mod for it. The workshop is also full of cool or ridiculous skins, maps, vehicles, and even mutators. All of these things combined, plus the ability to create and save presets, means Ravenfield can be almost anything you want it to be. This is the true experience of Ravenfield. Not the vanilla experience, but the experience of going from fighting in WWII, to fighting in modern times, to fighting a futuristic laser battle, to just applying random mutators to make the most cursed game possible. I've spent hours just downloading huge batches of weapons, and then meticulously balance testing them all against each other one after another. How many other games can you name where armies of Freddy Mercury and the Engineer engage each other in trench warfare with Fallout guns and A-10 Warthogs? Put simply, if your game doesn't take ten minutes to load, you're not playing Ravenfield to its fullest.

I've barely scratched the surface of this game. The rest is something you need to experience for yourself. For what you get, 15 dollars is an absolute burglary. To start you out though, I recommend that you download the entire World War II Collection by mellamomellamo, the NERF Pack by New_BEING_Newbie, and Project Eagle by Eagle Pancake (Also make sure you get lots of maps and some skins). This barely touches on all of the great mods that you should play, but discovering stuff for yourself while browsing the workshop is part of the fun.

That's all I have to say. I hope I managed to get at least one person to cough up the 15 bucks for this game, it really is worth it.