Avernum 5 Review
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The story of Avernum 5 is ok, but not great. There's nothing particularly inspired about the tale of Dorikas, his assassination attempt, and you hunting him down. But there are some elements woven into the plot that work well, including some (fairly superficial) intrigue and betrayal, and the (somewhat predictable) tragic nature of the main enemy character (which was present in Avernum 4, as well). Perhaps most importantly is the fact that you are faced with hard-hitting choices throughout the game. The most significant of these is the option to stay loyal to the Empire or to join Dorikas, but there are other moments where you can and should choose your allies and enemies carefully. Some of the choices you make earlier carry on into the rest of the game.
Avernum has always had (boss fights), where the bosses use special tactics and you have to get creative to beat them, but Avernum 5 has a lot more of these and it works out great. Fighting against the Soultaker or the Master of the Pit might have been frustrating as hell, but it was also fun.
In general, Averum 5 sports several design improvements over earlier installments, including combat scenarios scaling better with your characters from area to area, fewer annoying fights in which you have to walk through tunnels while guys pelt you with rocks, and better quest design overall.
What's not so much fun?
Most of my criticism here will apply to many of the Avernum games, but they're still worth a mention for this one.
To start off, for a game that prides itself in huge open-world gameplay, it sure has an overly linear feel to exploration. Not that you aren't relatively free to move around, but there are clearly segmented areas separated by bottlenecks. Sometimes you have to do a quest to go further, sometimes you don't, but each time you pass a bottleneck you know you're going into a tougher zone and you are supposed to be finished with the last zone. It works, but it's not ideal.
I had some small issues with balance. I've heard that some had problems in enemies being too tough, but I made my usual character build (fighters with ultimate traits + weak minds and magic users with ultimate traits + frailty) and found the game a walk in the park, as long as I was willing to spend half my time buffing and re-buffing my team, which is a bit tedious, but not challenging. The game's difficulty can be freely adapted as you play, so this is mostly an academic point.
Avernum 5 is to use Jeff Vogel's own words a (gigantic game). But bigger isn't necessarily better, especially not for quality-over-quantity players like me. The size is beginning to tell in key areas. As I mentioned, the game's quest design is better, there are less (hey please pick up 8 green rocks for me)-type things. But that doesn't mean quest design is actually good. It's still fairly weak and more importantly very repetitive.
The thing with Avernum quests is that they rarely challenge your faculties. Avernum 5 has more quests that require you to puzzle or think a bit, but the majority of quests is solved in the good old Avernum way by simply going everywhere and walking around every corner on every map. This works to a certain extent hell, it's probably where Avernum's exploration charm comes from but when the game gets this long, it starts to be a drag, especially if combat isn't very challenging any more (see below). I was actually glad to see how small the penultimate and last areas were, and how focused the quests were once you're beyond Vahnatai lands. Such relief borders on (it's almost over, yippee), which is never good.
I mentioned above I had some issues with balance and that showed up in annoying way in combat. Right from about halfway through the game, in the Anama lands, average combat stopped being something I had to think about. Just buff up and click a few times. Only the special fights brought some relief, but otherwise combat became a drag. Moving through a late-game area where your walking is continually interrupted by wolves that pose no challenge just isn't fun. Again, this is something that was present in all Avernum games and it's improved compared to Avernum 4, but it still wasn't fun.
