Avadon: The Black Fortress Reviews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on May 13th, 2011

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Let me be blunt as early as possible. If you fall into any of the following categories, you need to play Avadon: The Black Fortress yesterday:
1) The streamlining of RPGs irks you.

2) You like gigantic narratives with choices that are distinctly in the "gray" area of morality.

3) You remember Baldur's Gate 2 as one of the best games ever.

4) You remember Planescape: Torment as one of the best games ever.

I'm telling you this right now so you can go over to the website and start downloading the absolutely huge demo (I'm talking hours) immediately. In fact, you should probably do this even if you don't fall into any of the above categories because maybe you'll learn something about the way the old school rolls.

That said, it's not all candy canes and gravy. Abilities use stamina, which does not regenerate on its own unless you return to the point at which you began a particular mission to rest, or if you head back to the central (hub) of Avadon. This can be frustrating at times, as you essentially have to consider your stamina a limited resource. Additionally since the only way to discover if a room has lootable items is to open your inventory (where, bizarrely, the room's contents are displayed), you'll spend a lot of your time walking around and hitting '˜i' just to see if you've missed anything. I'm not advocating a (twinkling-loot) system that so many games seem to have included, but it would be nicer if I didn't feel like I actually had to roll to search each room. The map overlay is also confusing, often overlapping with other elements of text on the screen making it hard to figure out exactly where markers have been placed.

These are small issues for what is - at only 100MB to download - a small game (even smaller if you grab it quota-free from our mirror*). Avadon is an excellent game, one that twists dungeon crawling and story-telling together in an old-school package that will, assuming you're not afraid of the slightest change, give you hours of delight and amusement. Additionally, the fact that it keeps the old-school isometric engine means you should have no trouble loading it onto laptops, netbooks and the like. Just remember what you're playing, don't expect a graphical tour de force, and you'll have a great time.

I now want to mention the story. The bland, boring story. I already mentioned the origin of Avadon as a fortress earlier in the review, but there is more. The Hands of Avadon are being killed off and it's up to you to figure out what is up. Yes, that is it, except not exactly. There is more, but it's just one hundred percent uninteresting, there is something about a dragon that you need to calm down. Calm down, not kill. There are I think a couple of points in the game where you must do this and to do this you have to do some random quest for him that has nothing to do with the main plot, but that you still have to do to progress in the main plot.

Whilst playing this game I felt like I was being more pushed away rather than pulled in by the gameplay and story. Videogames should not do this and I should not have to say that. But I feel that Spiderweb Software needs to be told this because I'm not one hundred percent sure they know what videogames are like nowadays and just keep referring to Diablo to make their games.

There is something else weird and unforgivable in this game. There is a very random glitch that makes your main character just disappear from the game. The character's inventory and stats can still show up, but whenever you try to search for the character the game just brings you to a random black empty space on the map that is non-existent. I don't know what causes this, but it's happened twice and it's just broken my game and I had to go back to a save point before said event happened for my main character to appear again.

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