Avadon 2: The Corruption Review
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Another related issue is that the game will often only allow you to explore a location or meet a character once a quest has started - this can get especially silly, with solid rock walls inexplicably opening up to reveal new paths, or quest-critical characters being added to a location you thought you had fully explored. What's more, the game provides minimap markers for quest objectives, but only some, and it's not clear why for one quest I need to spend 20 minutes roaming an area I'd already explored five hours before just to find the one new thing in it, while another tells me exactly where to go. I found several quests unnecessarily difficult due to these annoyances and oversights, rather than any challenge in the quest content itself.
Presentation
Avadon 2 use the same engine as the last generation of Spiderweb Software games. This means, as usual, attractive-but-simplistic tile-based sprite graphics with an isometric perspective, point-and-click interface, minimal special effects, a limited number of hand-drawn portraits and vignettes, and a lot of text to read through. But, for fans of this style of game, the sparse graphics are not necessarily a serious complaint - they're are functional and effective, and with Avadon and Avadon 2 the consistency and variety of the art assets are much better than Spiderweb's earlier games. This is definitely Jeff Vogel's best work with respect to visuals, for what it's worth.
Avadon 2's sound work, unfortunately, is really starting to show its age. While the game has a decent opening theme song, much like other Spiderweb titles, there is no in-game music, sound effects are basic and of rather low quality (many dating back 10+ years to Spiderweb's earliest games), and the same old ambient sound loops are used again and again. I realize that as an indie studio, Spiderweb's resources are limited; however, Avadon is Spiderweb's best-selling game, and after over a decade of the same minimalist approach to sound, it's starting to get very boring if you've played more than one or two of these titles. Some brand-new sound effects and an actual soundtrack would have gone a long way to improving Avadon 2's aural experience.
The user interface in Avadon 2 is just like past Spiderweb games: sparse, functional and effective, if lacking in bells and whistles. There are liberal hotkeys available, the junk bag feature added in Avadon makes a welcome return, and overall it's well laid out and easy to understand. But, there are a few niggling issues and missing features. For instance: you can't close a menu by pressing the same hotkey used to open it; the combat grid is quite small, and it's too easy to mis-click the wrong spot or accidentally click your controlled character and skip your turn; the character screen is missing many important details, such as which attributes govern what skills; there's no volume controls available; the game requires a restart to change screen resolution or display mode; the mouse wheel can't be used for scrolling lists; and there's no way to rebind keys. While the engine still does its job, these little issues have existed for a long while in Spiderweb's games, and it's high time they were fixed.
Conclusion
Overall, Avadon 2 is very much more of the same for Avadon. What Avadon did well, in its interesting political situations that tread morally ambiguous ground, is still alive and well in Avadon 2, perhaps even better. There are also some enjoyable side-quests and a few companions I liked, even though a few too many characters were too bland and stock for my tastes. The Tinkermage character class is also something different and is more interesting to play than most of the other choices, too. Even though the overarching story itself is not very interesting, it's still a step up from the first game's.
Yet, Avadon 2 also maintains all the same issues the first game had in spades. There is too much of a focus on combat, and the combat that does make up most of the gameplay simply isn't very good most of the time. The quest design is often absurd and illogical in the way it cuts off opportunities from you arbitrarily. There's still an over-abundance of purely cosmetic choices, where a line of dialogue will change but the end result will be identical. And perhaps worst, it's simply too big and bloated for its own good, and doesn't have enough for the player to really do - that Diablo-level of depth to the character system really does lead to a mechanically shallow game on the whole.
Avadon found its niche of fans, of course, and Avadon 2 will still please those players who want more of the same, but as a sequel, and Spiderweb's umpteenth game overall, I feel these issues shouldn't be overlooked. At $10 on Steam and GOG, and $20 at Spiderweb's official site, Avadon 2: The Corruption still follows the Spiderweb mantra of providing a lot of game for your dollar, and I still do appreciate Jeff Vogel's incredible effort in building such huge RPGs with such a small team. But, take away the sheer size and ambition of the "one-man RPG studio", and the game both comes up lacking next to Spiderweb's excellent Geneforge and Avernum games, and unambitious when taken as a sequel to the first Avadon.
