Avencast: Rise of the Mage Review
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Avencast: Rise of the Mage, the debut effort from Austrian developer Clockstone Software, is a difficult game to characterize. It starts out like it's going to be funny (the first time you see your character, you're sleeping in class), but then it tries to be serious and overly weighty. It looks for all the world like it's going to be an action role-playing game, but then it plays more like a tactical one. And it employs a fairly simple point-and-click interface, but then it manages to include some clever and complex puzzles. Sometimes incongruities can be good, because they make you think, but in Avencast I felt like I was adrift in a game that didn't know what it wanted to be or where it wanted to go, and the journey to find out wasn't a lot of fun.
The Story
In Avencast you play an apprentice mage at a prestigious magician's academy. As fate would have it, on the very day when you're slated to go on your trials to become a full magician, demons burst onto the scene, and they quickly overrun the academy, trapping you with a few other survivors (including a convenient shopkeeper) in one of the academy's study halls. With most everybody else dead, that leaves it up to you to push back the demons and eventually take the fight to them.
Does that premise sound familiar? If you change a few words here and there, it would work to describe just about every action role-playing game ever produced. Worse, early on you learn that your character is an orphan, and that you were discovered as a baby wearing a mysterious amulet. Gee, do you think maybe those little tidbits will turn out to be important? Just once I'd like to play an orphan in a role-playing game and not have my uncertain heritage be the deciding factor in whether I can defeat the demon horde or the evil magician or the insane god.
Clichés aside, the writing in Avencast is not especially good. For some reason, characters never talk to you; they always orate at you, and they never say in one sentence what they could spew out in about three paragraphs. I'm not sure how much of this has to do with the translation from Austrian to English (maybe all the words cut out of The Witcher during its translation were tracked down and tossed in here), but whereas usually I want people to talk more to flesh out who they are and what's going on and things like that, in Avencast I just wanted everybody to shut up and give me a quest already.
Characters
Avencast uses a classless system. Each time you level up, you get ten points to spend, and you can use those points to learn new spells or to bump up your attributes. There are two schools of magic in the game: blood magic and soul magic. Blood mages use their spells to improve their melee attacks, while soul mages fling spells in the usual way. There are also some summoning spells available, which allow you to summon creatures to help you out.
In other words, despite being forced to play as a mage in the game, you're still given some options for how to go about your business. Soul mages, with spells like Inferno Wall and Ice Meteor, play like typical mages, and they're best off staying as far away from their enemies as possible. Blood mages meanwhile get spells like Inferno Lash and Hammer of Rage, which means they need to stay in melee range of their enemies. You can learn spells from both schools of magic if you want, but clearly they're at odds with each other, and so you're best off specializing in one school or the other.
Unfortunately, characters in the game are not very complex. They only get four attributes -- health, mana, soul magic and blood magic -- and each school of magic only gets about 20 spells. Once you've purchased the spells that you like (maybe a dozen of them), there isn't anything much to do other than dump points in your particular school of magic (since that attribute increases the damage that you do), which is sort of boring.
Mechanics
Avencast is played using an isometric view, but instead of pointing and clicking to move your character around, you have to use the WASD keys. Fortunately, the game includes three different control modes to choose between -- for example, in one the W key moves your character towards the top of the screen, while in another the W key moves your character forward -- and so one of them should be comfortable for you.
In fact, the interface in general is nice and configurable. For example, you're given special slots where you can quaff potions with a single key stroke, but if you don't like them then you can also pause the game and double click on the potions in your inventory, and quaff them that way. Plus, all of the keys (including the mouse buttons) are configurable, and you're allowed to map up to eight spells to hotkeys (or mouse clicks), giving you lots of control over your attacks.
Probably the most interesting thing about the interface is that the game gives you an extra way to cast your spells. Each spell includes a specific combination of key strokes and mouse clicks to cast it. For example, the Mighty Ice Bullet of Penetration (which soul mages will cast a lot) can be triggered by typing A and then D and then clicking the right mouse button. The nice thing about these combinations is that they all use the WASD keys and the mouse buttons, which means that they allow you to do almost everything in the game without moving your hands around on the keyboard. The bad thing is that the combinations are clunky, and they require a lot of extra key strokes and mouse clicks to get anything done. I tried using the combinations for a while but never got the hang of it, and I ended up using the 1-8 keys to trigger my spells.
That being said, I appreciated that Clockstone attempted to come up with a new and more convenient way to control the game, even if it didn't work for me. The best interface is always the one that gives you the most options.
Gameplay
Avencast focuses on two things: combat and puzzles. Let me start with the combat, since it is the weaker of the two. Unlike in most action role-playing games, the combat in Avencast is much tougher -- at least at the start. Instead of just blowing through everything on your way to the next boss fight, most creatures in the game can actually kill you, and so you have to forge ahead slowly and carefully. Enemies don't re-spawn, so once you've killed something you're safe to catch your breath and prepare for the next battle.
The problem with combat is that all characters get some sort of freeze spell, and frozen enemies can be re-frozen before they thaw out. That means most fights go something like freeze, whack, whack, freeze, whack, whack, freeze until the enemy dies, which gets a little tedious. I played a soul mage, and so combat got exciting whenever I couldn't freeze an enemy (which was pretty much the case for every boss), but then Avencast also has the other famously exploitable spell, Inferno Wall, and so if I wasn't freezing enemies, I was dropping down lines of fire and running around like crazy until the enemy burned itself up, which also got tedious. Generally, I'd say that you should avoid relying on cheesy spells that the enemy AI isn't smart enough to avoid, but in the case of Avencast, I think the game was actually designed with them in mind.
The puzzles, on the other hand, work pretty well. They range from word games to tile puzzles to riddles, and they're almost always clever and effective. And better yet, they're all original. You won't see any (old favorites) like the Towers of Hanoi puzzle in Knights of the Old Republic. I was surprised about how well the puzzles worked. There were a couple where I actually had to go to a fan site to see what the answer was, and while that's a common enough occurrence for me when I play adventures, let's just say that role-playing games usually aren't that complex.
The problem is, the puzzles are only fun to do once. Once you've figured out the answer or the trick, that's it. There isn't any challenge to completing them a second time, and that hurts the replayability of the game. I'm sort of curious about how the campaign might go for a blood mage, but I have no desire to slog through all of the combat again, I already completed all of the puzzles, and there aren't any choices to make in the quests, and so there's not enough left to do in the campaign to draw me back in. If you're designing a role-playing game, then you should want your players to go through the campaign at least twice, but that isn't the case here, at least for me, even with the game's relatively short (roughly 25-hour) playing time.
Conclusion
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is a mid-priced role-playing game that feels a lot like a bargain-priced role-playing game. It has some things going for it, like the interface and the puzzles, but it has some other things going against it, like the monotony of the combat and the clichés of the story. Since the negative influences far outweigh the positive influences, it's tough to get excited about Avencast or even to recommend it. You'll probably find a better game in the bargain bin of your local software store.
