Avadon: The Black Fortress (in 3 hours)

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. 

Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades

The Basics: A blend of voxel based block crafting and classic team first person shooter.

Previous Time Spent: 36

Expectation of learning Curve: Low

Why I bought this: Minecraft Phase

My 3 Hours with the Game: I began getting back into the game with an astoundingly small download on steam, which earned the game a bunch of points from the get-go. From there, I dove in to the game itself. 

Knowing little about what to expect, and with a very fuzzy memory of the game-play from a few years ago, I decided to go ahead and join a random server. This turned out to be a very fast paced and fun zombie mode, where players begin as human, and attempt to survive against a growing horde of undead. This has been done plenty of times before, but I enjoyed the added lunacy of mutable environments. I spent a good deal of time trying to build a massive tower to protect myself from the dead, and was surprised when it came collapsing on itself, leading to brief violence and a quick transformation into a zombie. 

Playing as a zombie was a delight, and had a completely different feel and basic strategy, which I appreciated. All in all, the zombie mode provided solid, engaging and bizarre mindless fun. I could choose to strategically defend myself, run around like an idiot, or just dig a hole and cover myself with dirt, hoping that the undead didn't find me. 

I spent a lot of time digging holes in this game. Even in the engaging classic capture the flag mode. When I started playing capture the flag, I was a bit worried, as the server was more quiet, and clearly less chaotic. However, after finding my bearings, learning to follow the map, and getting into it, it felt a lot like playing capture the flag as a kid, only with bolt action rifles. 

The levels are huge, and the ability to dig and build allows a lot of opportunity for creative strategy and silly low cunning. 

The bottom line: This is the first game in my steam backlog that I'm happy to have purchased. It's the first that I will keep installed, and occasionally go back to as a silly time-waster. The low learning curve helped quite a bit, and I enjoyed the cutesy, retro-inspired graphical touches. 

7 Days to Die dozens of times in 3 hours

7 Days to Die

(Dozens of Times in a Period of 3 Hours)

The Basics: A zombie oriented first person survival and crafting game. 

Previous Time Spent: 18 minutes

Expectation of learning Curve: Fairly High

Why I bought this: I convinced myself that I liked survival games.

My 3 Hours with the Game: My time began with the creation of an odd looking fat man, pictured below:

Following the normal grotesque adjustment of sliders that accompanies a game where I'm allowed to make my own avatar, I chose the default settings for things like night and day cycle (50 minutes), zombie running (only at night), and difficulty. I then loaded up the game, which worked to generate the world I'd inhabit for these next several hours. 

After the game loaded, my first impressions were of an ugly wasteland of broken down cars, shambling corpses and little sense of purpose. So, I wandered, and within minutes (after successfully scavenging a brass candlestick from a car) died for no apparent reason. Later, I learned that this unexplained death was the result of not looking down, and being bitten by a zombie who was dragging itself along the dirty roadway. 

So, I started again, taking the time to make a slightly more cartoonishly ugly avatar, and awoke in a desert. This desert was populated with typical desert things, cacti, large chunks of rock, broken down cars, zombies, and rabbits. After scavenging in some cars, I found a shovel, and then a sense of purpose in a rabbit, which I chased through the desert for some time, before dying, coming back to life, and finding my way to a compound. There, I found some things, but mostly the restless undead, and an unpleasant death. 

I should pause here and point out again, that death came constantly in this game for a while. Eventually though, I took the time to look at some crafting recipes, and learn to hide. 

Learning to hide was what gave me my first spot of hope. I survived an entire night by hiding out, slowly grabbing cotton, and apparently spinning cotton into usable clothing with my bare hands in mere seconds per piece. After surviving the night, I ran into a zombie dog while trying to scavenge my way through a building. This didn't go well, and my poorly assembled club did not prove an adequate match for the beast. So, I died. 

With that, I decided to start fresh once again, and built a new world. This time, I reduced the general frequency of zombies, and randomly generated the environment, hoping for a fresh, safe start. So, I awoke in a relatively peaceful forest. I spent my day sneaking around the woods, and then built a crude shelter on top of a boulder.

My shelter consisted of a sleeping bag (that I made myself out of cotton), and a few pieces of ladder that I set up to sort of float in front of the rock (made of sticks which I gathered by punching bushes). I stayed in this shelter until about midnight, and then came to the realization that my shelter allowed me the relative luxury of sort of saving and being able to start in a familiar place if I died. Emboldened by my immortality, I left my shelter, and starting crouch walking through the moonlit woods, collecting sticks, rocks, and cotton as I walked. 

In those woods, I learned the secret of zombie bopping, and became confident enough to face individual zombies in the old Daggerfall style (backwards walking, running, circling). With this new bit of confidence, and realization that I was nearing my 3 hour requirement, I pressed on, intrigued by a lone 2 story mansion in the distance. I found the mansion, but before I could get close, I heard the telltale cries of zombies. A veritable horde came from the surrounding woods and structure, surrounding me. |I tried retreating, tried fighting them off, but I fell quickly.

I reawoke a short time later(sans equipment in the classic MMO style), atop my little shelter, Set on revenge, I began traveling through the forest, sneaking through the early morning hours, and assembling a club as I walked. I approached the house as the dawn rose behind me. The zombies, slower in the daylight, were easier to handle. I spent a good deal of time running around the woods, luring individuals away, bopping them on the head with my club. Then, I got greedy. 

I moved slowly away from the house, attempting to draw the horde away, into the woods where they would be easier to evade. Then, I made a mad rush for the house itself, barely dodging the few stragglers from the horde of zombies. I ran to the front door, finding it locked. Then I rushed up a set of stairs leading to a second floor porch, making my way into the house through a broken window. As I set to scavenging, the horde approached. The vast majority of them went a fairly direct route, breaking through the front door into the kitchen where I was frantically searching for things.

Panicked, I led them up the stairs, only to find a few had come up the porch stairs, and were entering the window. Trapped, I tried luring more up the stairs, hoping to jump down and push past any remaining zombies. Unfortunately, my poorly thought out plan did not have timing on it's side, and I landed in the middle of several undead, who made quick work of me.

Final Verdict: I could see myself playing more of this game. After getting the hang of some of the systems involved, it certainly worked for the creation of emergent narrative. However, it is brutal, unforgiving, and a bit ugly. I definitely regret picking it up on Steam, but I don't hate myself for the purchase.