Daily Review: Avadon: The Black Fortress

Daily Review

Avadon: The Black Fortress

System: PC (Steam)
Status: Beaten
Currently: Just finished normal mode. Need to play on harder difficulties to complete.

So, finally finished this game after working on it all week (hence the lack of posts, didn't want to post about it till I finished up the last bits.) My thoughts are still unabashedly positive about it, it is a more than worthy game to purchase, especially if you like old school PC RPGs, and was a fun adventure game I will probably play again. It did have some flaws, though they were minor.

The first major flaw is the bossfights are...well..boring. Either the boss is far too easy and you overpower them rather quickly, or they come in two flavors: Minion deluge, and way too much HP. Due to the battle system's style (which I liked overall), there's really not much variety in the boss fights. They will throw around some buffs or debuffs you can't really do much about unless you want to waste a turn you could be doing damage, and you wail on them. If they have minions, you either ignore them because they don't do enough damage to be a pest and just make it hard to move around, or you have to track down the one minion shielding the master, then wail on them till it is resummoned. This is not a major problem in and of itself, except that due to the class system being rather limited (you advance, get some skills through a tree), your skill choices are at most 8-9 skills, most of which are variations of AoE damage or some status. So pretty much every boss fight runs down to whether or not you can deal damage faster than they can.

The other major flaw is the game seems seriously weighted towards the difficulty being foes dealing a lot of damage, getting a lot of attacks, and swarming you. Admittedly, while only playing on normal, I was going for the achievement where you only use one ally (instead of two) throughout the entire game. My partner for this was the mage, who I thought complimented my main character (warrior) rather well. The warrior class once you get to a point if you build it well...is near indestructible. I had over 80% or so damage reduction to most things, parried/dodged most attacks, and had a good chance to just start regenerating whenever I got smacked.  The mage was great at dealing damage, but couldn't take many physical hits, and with the abundance of archers, she often went down like a wet sack. This usually left my warrior to slowly slaughter every single enemy, so I could leave combat and have her auto-revive (still got the achievement for no-revives too). As it stands, I can't see how you could ever play this game without using the warrior, every enemy gets 2-3 attacks or turns to your one, constantly buffs themselves and their friends, and deals enough damage to take out the squishier classes in a single turn if you're unlucky. What makes it worse is that with the daze and charm spells being thrown around constantly, you can be either chainlocked/stunned for the entire combat and just die...or your warrior gets charmed and murders your other party members brutally, leaving him to solo the encounter. Again.

Still, with those two flaws being apparent, I will still be playing it again on a higher difficulty later. For some reason, the game reminded me of fallout, mostly due to the high amount of personal choices you were allowed to make, and how they actually affected things later, including little blurbs at the end talking about unresolved quests or changes you made to lands for the better. They definately put a lot of work in making you feel that all these grey and grey choices you make in the game actually matter to various characters, and not making you feel like you have to take a quest you think is wrong to max out your level.

A very well done game.