The Basics: Isometric top-down RPG
Previous Time Spent: 5 minutes
Expectation of learning Curve: Medium
Why I bought this: Gushing review from a writer at RockPaperShotgun followed by a steam sale.
First Impressions: This game feels a bit like Fallout 1/2 meets a simpler version of Baldur's Gate, with isometric 2d movement of characters through environments, dialogue, hording of stuff(standard videogame RPG kleptomania), and grid based combat. A lot of this felt fairly flat to me, which I'll cover a bit more in the later portions.
My 3 Hours with the Game: I began the game by choosing a name and class for my character. I went with Orrin Hatch for a name, and chose a class that I figured was basically a ninja/thief archetype. I was then treated to some basic info about the setting, and sent to a castle to begin my duties. Below is a screenshot showing my character, the inventory, and the approach to said Castle.
Upon arriving in the castle, I was blown away by the ability to just wander around, pick up random junk, and engage in brief conversations with people throughout the sprawling grounds. Before long, I was assigned a sort of tutorial dungeon crawl, which entailed going into the castle dungeons, and looking for dangerous escaped prisoners. There, I got to see the way the systems of the game come together for combat, etc. Below is an image from Dungeon 1.
As you can see above, this is an isometic, top down dungeon with tons of stuff. It was fairly fun up to a point, but I found it to break down into mindless backtracking, and easy to forget objectives. The dungeons sprawl a good deal, which is fun from an exploration standpoint, but gets to be a bit tiresome due to the map feature, which merely brings up an overlay. Additionally I found that there was a lot that just didn't land, including dialogue, and inventory management stuff. It took me until hour 2 or so to realize that stuff would fall on the ground, and the method for picking it up is opening the inventory and grabbing stuff from the ground. I'm used to other games, and was too lazy to actually read the manual, so this is on me. Additionally, I found that with dialogue, the writers often seemed to want to tell me things instead of showing me things with the writing.
Combat was fairly fun, and felt like taking battles from 3.0/3.5 era D&D, grid and all. Early on, the battles seemed fairly flat and a bit too easy, but as the game progressed a bit, I found a decent variety of monster abilities and tactics that kept stuff interesting. All in all though, I think the combat from other games may have spolied me a bit too much. I kept wanting this to feel as dangerous as Darkest Dungeon or Wasteland 2, but only in one of the many battles I fought did I feel any sense of doom. The combat is pictured below.
My highlight:I had the most fun with the game once I made my way out of the castle and it's immediate surroundings and took a portal to Kva, a desert region. There, I had the mission of chatting up a dragon, and dealing with it's goblin/whatever ugly intelligent being problem. There, I felt like I was starting to get a sense of the fairly interesting political situation of the game, and the way a world like this might actually work. Also, as an old Baldur's Gate fan, I definitely enjoyed the sort of adventuring that just comes from wandering around while you have actual missions to complete, stealing stuff, etc. Plus, I got to do some super-tropey D&D style stuff, like killing rats/goblins, and talking to a fairly tiny dragon who lives in a magma chamber, as pictured below.
The exploration was fun, and made it clear to me that there's a lot more to this game and story. If it hadn't been for that section, I probably would not be recommending it. But now I can see the potential.
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My verdict: I don't love this game due to some of the presentation issues and the flat feel, but I could see getting sucked in. I'd give it a qualified recommendation for folks who were very into BG, Fallout 1/2, etc., with the caveat that character creation is far simpler, and there is less of a sense of danger, at least in the portions that I tried. Another plus for this game is that I can imagine it would probably run really well on an older machine, or a laptop without a ton of resources.
-Jon
PS: I won't be reviewing Avadon 2:The Corruption at this time, for fear of spoilers. As a result, the next game on my docket is Betrayer.
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