Kickstart My Heart: Ravaged is Shaping Up to be the Multiplayer RAGE Never Had

One of the benefits of backing as many Kickstarter campaigns as I have is that some days I wake up and find beta keys for up and coming crowd funded games in my inbox. Every day is Christmas when you Kickstart all the things.

One of the more promising projects I backed was Ravaged. A post-apocalyptic multiplayer vehicular shooter that may just fill the void left by RAGE‘s lack of traditional MP.

Thanks to my contribution, I’ve been given access to the Ravaged beta and I’m pleased to report that so far it’s everything I’d hoped for and more. [Go watch this video in 720p]

Multiple game modes that’ll have you capturing objectives BF3 style, a variety of classes each outfitted with cool weapons and of course, the vehicles. Bikes, trikes, cars, buggies and gyrocopters all let you wreak havoc across the ruined battlefields of Ravaged. Is it as polished as RAGE? Of course not. This isn’t a multi-million dollar game developed by id and backed by Bethesda.

This is a (partially) crowd funded Unreal 3 envisioning of what traditional RAGE multiplayer could have been – and I dig it, baby.

Since the game is built with the Unreal Development Kit it plays solid enough, looks pretty damn good at max settings and feels about as polished as you’d expect. The weapon and class variation comes as the biggest surprise. I had no idea there was an assassin class that carried a scoped crossbow or a heavy class that totes around a giant minigun. It’s quite a good time already, and it’s still a beta. I only wished there were more people playing it right now.

What more can I say. It’s the beauty of crowd funding really. Not only do we get to help fund the development of games, from time to time we also get to partake in said development – and I for one think that’s pretty cool.

Ravaged will be available later this year. To pre-order (and get into the beta) or to learn more, head on over to developer 2Dawn’s website

Oh, by the way. That video required no editing. I simply looped “Kickstart my Heart” over the Ravaged gameplay trailer. Definitive proof that Mötley Crüe goes with everything.