IT'S ABOUT TIME!

Frankly this is probably old news to many of you reading this. I'm ashamed that I didn't know about these Spiderweb titles previously.

Gather round me children, for there's a tale I'd like to share. Once there was a time when video games entertained the player an immersive story and provocative challenges that kept you playing for hours.

I've never liked the term "dungeon crawler". To me the crawler part implies slow which let's be honest, is generally associated with boring in the world of books, movies and video games. When was the last time you couldn't wait to dig in to a slow book someone recommended?
So when I saw that genre ascribed to this and other Spiderweb titles I dismissed them pretty quickly. I didn't feel like click-spamming my way through another shallow DC chasing the next-best weapon for hours on end - mindlessly racing to the next waypoint, only taking breaks to managing a mountain of gear (/cough...torchlight)...

So as I was browsing my games library through titles I'll never get to and I barely recognize, the term "turn-based" caught my eye.
"Turn-based"...dungeon-crawler?
Now that's a name I"ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

I must have played through "Planescape: Torment" three times since it's release. The same can be said for "Fallout 1/2".
I can't chalk up their awesome replayablility to nostalgia any more. These are simply incredibly entertaining titles and the reason I've played them all so often is that nothing after (to my knowledge) ever properly took up where they left off. Well that was until I discovered this game.

This game, like Planescape and Fallout 1&2 focus on story depth, simple, intuitive UI/game mechanics, and challenging "strategic" (yet simple) combat. I don't mean simple as in "easy", I just mean you will very quickly become well-versed your battle playbook and the challenge lies in making good decisions as it is turn-based.
If you're familiar Fallout 1 & 2 or Planescape Torment then to put it simply this game is very similar to those but in a classic fantasy setting. It's also a nice reminder of the days when RPG titles didn't hold your hand every step of the way. The quest descriptions are clear, but the objectives are kept broad enough keep the players guessing as to how exactly to complete them.

Combine all of the above with perfectly classic "if-it-ain't-broke" fantasy RPG elements and you have this surprisingly impressive game. I can't recommend this title enough for old-school PC nerds like myself as well as newcomers.

I could go on and on but I gotta get back to the game.
I give it 2 ogre-thumbs up

Avadon's weakness is that it's not Avernum or Geneforge.

I know it's the comparison everyone draws, but I think it's a valid one. Having finally played my way through the series, Avadon isn't a bad game, it's even a good one. But Avernum and Geneforge were GREAT. I don't mean graphically, but the tremendous open worlds in Avernum (excluding 5), the complex and nuanced moral choice in Geneforge (excluding 3), and the sheer number of things to do and see and explore were something that made Spiderweb RPGs so great.

Avadon is, well, interesting. Morally it's wanting to be Geneforge, but exploring the ethics of government and law (and how far is permissible in the service of protecting the people) as opposed to bioethics as in Geneforge. It feels as though it falls short, though. There is less nuance, less picking a side, and more railroad tracks. These are not necessarily bad things in an RPG, but Avadon doesn't feel, well, strong enough to support it.

I tentatively recommend, but only if you have a soft spot for graphically weak tactical RPGs. I'd recommend Avernum to anyone who can withstand the shoddy graphics (it's amazing), but for Avadon it really needs to be your cup of tea for me to advise buying it.

A very well-crafted game world. What the writing lacks in concision it makes up for in quality. The RPG gameplay is engaging, if not a bit OCD-inducing. My major gripe with the game would be the repetitive ambient sounds used in place of music, but that mostly comes my having previously played other Spiderweb Software games that also recycled these sounds. Still, though, the gameplay and player-influenceable story are more than enough to make the game worth playing on their own.

Edit: after reading some of the other reviews, I should mention that I'm playing on Casual (not ashamed to admit it), so I'm not really experiencing some of the difficulty-related complaints that others are. Pretty much the only difficulty-related thing I'm running into is that I don't really have a chance to use up my consumables fast enough on Casual, so I probably waste more time managing my inventory than I might on a harder difficulty. But that's very minor.

If you're familiar with Spiderweb Software's RPGs, it will come as no surprise that Avadon: The Black Fortress is another extensive old school party-based trek through areas full of nooks and crannies with unique encounters and secret loot caches to be had, as well as exciting set piece encounters and an intriguing overall narrative. That's pretty much true of everything they put out. The big changes to the formula are: a new world; a significantly more linear progression than most of the other entries in their lineup, a class-and-skill-tree approach to character builds, and party members who are fully fledged NPCs that contribute insights and dialogue throughout the plot as you move through it, can be spoken to between missions, and have their own side agendas you will have to deal with.

The new world is an intriguing fantasy setting where five disparate and feuding lands have banded together in a defensive pact against pirates, invading empires, marauding humanoids and dragons, a blighted magical corruption, and other exterior threats. The pact is held together by the dictatorial enforcement of the Black Fortress Avadon, and they maintain a network of spies and enforcement agents to ensure compliance. The fairly unique conceit of this particular entry (and who knows, perhaps followup games in the series) is that you play Hands of Avadon, sent to enforce the laws of the pact and defend it from threats within and without. This gives you rather more authority and a much more fearsome reputation than your typical band of wandering adventurers, and this is used to good effect throughout, although alas you still have to contend with buying your own supplies, a tired RPG trope that seems even more out of place in this context (though they do attempt to explain it).

The linearity is somewhat unfortunate, but things do open up as you gain access to more of the areas and return to zones on new missions, and most of the sidequests can be done at your leisure. Still, the flipside of linearity is that you're always being sent into challenges that you should be equipped to handle, and it's always clear what you're expected to do next, neither of which are guaranteed in more open formats.

I am personally a big fan of Avadon's approach to skills and classes. I find the structure of new ability at rank 1, additional effect(s) at later ranks, and unlocking a secondary ability at a late rank very rewarding and I never feel like my points are wasted or that I have to save points from level to level just to advance at all, which have been issues I've historically had with the more freeform skill approach earlier Spiderweb games took (and other games with skill systems, for that matter). And Avernum in particular suffered from boring fighter syndrome where spellcasters got huge suites of spells to cast for a varied combat experience and fighters...got to hit things. Not here. The Blademaster class even passively is a blast, with heavy passive investment rewarding cleaves, a hilariously effective level of hit prevention, and the chance to riposte, curse enemies, or begin regenerating if hit, and then on top of that gets group buffs and debuffs and attacks with additional secondary effects. The Shadowwalker hurls shurikens, teleports around, throws pots of acid and smoke bombs, backstabs and poisons, and is a huge fountain of damage in general. (Needless to say, I was pleased when the Avernum remake cribbed from this system, albeit in a more Avernum-y way.)

As for the NPCs - there's one of every type, you get them all pretty nearly immediately, they stay levelled with you even if you're not using them, and they all have interesting personalities and backstories. I've never been a huge fan of the "party too large for everyone to simultaneously adventure with you" thing, but this is about as good as it gets considering that.

So all in all, another classic RPG. It's not quite as old school as previous series from Spiderweb, but the deviations from that formula mostly are in the vein of improvements in RPG design, in my book, not stepping away from the core appeal.

I bought this game a long time ago for a decent amount of money, but since it's a long game, I postponed playing it... Until recently.

Many of the "recommended" reviews here are from people who spent a very, very short time playing Avadon. Had I written such a review when I was only a couple of hours into the game, it would have been positive, too. It was very fun at the start... but then it became profoundly NOT fun.

You see, early on, you have a couple of quests and a couple of locations. You have various characters, you find items, battles are nice, you get better loot, your characters work in synergy... And then the game suddenly becomes a chore. Quests pile up. The quest texts never get updated. There are no indicators anywhere about the people you need to visit or return to. No indicator of what you need to do. I spent a lot of time going around and talking to people, only to find out that a quest isn't over. The loot doesn't scale up. Your damage doesn't scale up. And the game difficulty (I played on "normal") suddenly switches to "most frustrating game ever". You die. You die a lot. You are too weak. You need luck with the RNG, and you need potions and scrolls in greater amounts that you can obtain. Your abilities are on a large cooldown. Again, not enough potions to alleviate that. To add insult to injury, you spend vitality on abilities and vitality *does not recharge by itself*. You need to basically go back to the Avadon fortress on a semi-regular basis. There's no real quick-travel system, so every time you want to do that, you're looking at about five wasted minutes.

About 15 hours in, I seriously contemplated quitting right there and then; but I said to myself "you spent more on this than on many other games, so you NEED to finish it". I had a quest to follow a warrior into the woods and clear out some spiders. "Some" turned out to be about four nests of four to five spiders each. They were teleporting spiders which cast corrupting spells and thus did a lot of damage-over-time. Took me an hour to finally win that sidequest. Okay, I said, this is one of the harder battles; let's continue. Then I found what was an almost unbeatable Shade. Somehow managed to get that done as well. Then I found an evil Drake that spawned minions *and* mind-controlled several tough soldiers (EDIT: forgot to mention that it was HEALING those soldiers, so every time you came close to killing one, it would be healed to max HP; repeat 4-5 times, while your characters die and you've spent all of your potions). That... that was unbeatable, and it was the turning point at which I resorted to cheats: bumped my characters to level 30, then constantly used healing, shields and ability cooldown reset.

I gave up on the sidequests. I have no idea where I found most of the people and what I needed to do next (again - the quest system is extremely rudimentary and doesn't tell you anything). Even with constant cheating, it took me a total of 40 hours to finish the main story line.

Disregard the "recommended" reviews, honestly, and check the achievements:

Only 1/3 of the total number of players met a certain NPC called Redbeard, and that happens *very* early into the game.

Only 1/50 (a measly 2%) of the players finished Avadon. Two percent. Wow.

You see all those <40hr reviews? Yeah, they recommended a game they never finished. If it's so fun and great and awesome, why did they stop playing? Because of the issues I mentioned here. Let's not even get into "OMG BEST GAME EVER!!11" reviews from people with 1-5 hours in.

Skip this. Honestly. Even if you get this in a bundle, it's just not worth playing. Get an RPG that's actually fun.

If you *do* feel masochistic and try to play without cheating, I'll give you a tip: in this game, Dexterity rules. Get it to a minimum of 25.

Highly not recommended.

Avadon: The Black Fortress is a fine modern RPG made in the old-school style. Except better: no swapping floppy disks or CDs! But it makes me a little sad to say that it feels like a chore to play.

Visually, Avadon exists in a 1995 timewarp: Better looking than the SSI "Gold Box" D&D RPGs, but not as nice as the Baldur's Gate era games from Bioware/Black Isle.

But Avadon isn't so concerned about appearances. What makes this old-looking game work in 2013 is how fluid the experience is. It looks dated, but it streamlines gameplay, and adds modern features like skill trees, and the ability to scale the game difficulty if you want to move more quickly through the game's difficult bits. And your character speeds around the screen! No more waiting as your party trudges around the map; this game respects your time, as your characters hustle around in loose formation.

But this fast game pace brings me to the part that I don't like. Avadon is big on prose, like RPGs used to be. Avadon makes up for its stick-figure graphics by providing rich, descriptive storytelling. There's a lot of reading to be done, and no voice acting. So far, so good.

But in Avadon, your character moves so quickly from encounter to encounter, you find yourself reading constantly. There's no break. It's like reading a book. Frankly, I find myself resenting how much reading this game is asking me to do. And I kept nodding off as I was playing.

Baldur's Gate was probably a 80 hour game. Avadon makes me wonder how much of that time was just trudging around on the screen, revealing the dark parts. Walking from place to place. The pace was slow, but maybe that was an intentional break from all the reading we were asked to do back then. Walk a little, fight a little, walk a little, read a little. In Avadon, it feels like read-run-read-run-read-run. So... much... reading.

I recommend Avadon, because I respect how fine of a job Spiderweb has done to streamline old game mechanics, while still maintaining a flavorful, old-school feeling. And the story's good! But bring your spectacles; you're going to be doing a lot of reading as you play.

On a related note, I recently purchased a pack of classic Bioware RPGs from GOG.com. I plan to go back and finish the games from that era that I never played -- Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale. I look forward to seeing how I feel about playing these games 15 years later. Will the pacing feel better than Avadon? Stay tuned to find out.

I tried to get into the Avernum series as well, but ended up putting those down fairly quickly. I love turn-based combat and good writing with NPC interaction. Avadon has it. I don't care about graphics or voice acting. Old school and I are friends. I played through Bard's Tale and beaten several Wizardry titles (5 being my favorite).

So where has it gone wrong for me? It's very hard for me to put in writing, but I find that Avadon is missing some things.

- Character progression feels as though I have very few actual choices. Gaining and improving the better skills requires leveling what I consider "filler" skills. I could plan ahead all of my leveling within two minutes of seeing the very limited skill tree. It's shallow.
- I tend to prefer turn-based grid games with more controllable characters. 3 isn't enough. 4 can work, but the story needs to have a lot more life. 5 and 6+ are more my speed if combat is to be the focus of the game, because then the battles tend to be more epic and meaningful. I keep running into pointless fights with bats and rats. That's fine for a 1st-person dungeon crawler, but not Avadon.
- There are very few NPCs with personality that truly resonates with me. Effort was certainly made here by the developer, but in my opinion it's falling flat. Maybe I need to rethink my standards. Maybe I've gotten used to main characters with a bit more life than this one. Silent and lifeless "Dragon Quest-like" main characters aren't cutting it for me these days, I guess.
- I'm being led around by the nose with very little freedom to handle things my way or exert my authority as a Hand of Avadon. An example - dealing with the wizard at the fort (the names escape me, they're all odd and hyphenated, but this is the area just after appeasing the Z-dragon). Avadon insists that I go behind his back and talk to the lesser leaders in the area. Why? I've been told to maintain secrecy. As a Hand in enemy territory, I should have the freedom to deal directly with the local lord and this meddlesome wizard, but I cannot force my way in. This might have worked better as an open-world adventure, much like Avernum, and provide the player a bit more freedom.
- I despise the lockpick system. I'm OCD about getting everything in an area. The lockpick system puts a hard cap on the areas I can explore and the chests I can open. I don't feel like save-scumming to figure out what's behind every door and chest that requires lockpicks, and hampering my NPCs' growth to improve lockpick efficiency is an awful game mechanic.

Wish I'd read Pinky's review before throwing money and time at this one. Despite all the hate the comment section contains, taking one look at the amount of up-votes on that review should send up the red flag for everyone. Personally, I really need to call it quits with Spiderweb Software.

after 50ish long hours of fun and often intense gameplay i have beaten my first spidweb game.
I highly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of turnbased strategy rpg games. the story is very good the lore is awesome and its not too hard once you learn the basics. there are a few incredibly tough fights even on normal mode. i managed to get the keeper ending the servant of avadon ending. now im off to the sequel.
but if there is one thing i dislike about this game is the fact that is contains multiple endings. now some people like or even love multiple ending games. as for me i rather despise them. for starters i like to have a canon ending and i also like to see all the story and when there is multiple endings that means the story branches which means i have to play even more. and while i love playing this game i do not like having to repeat the story only to go down a slightly different path. but now im just nitpicking, all things considered i HIGHLY recommend this game, and all the other products of this company.(granted i have only played demos of the other games but they are still fun.)

My recommendation comes with a caveat, I am only recommending this to people who enjoy turn-based cRPGs. I personally am not a fan of turn based combat, which is the reason I eventually gave up on finishing the game.

Visually and audibly, the game is nothing to write home about, being made by one person it is understanable and they are functional enough not to detract from the game in any major way.

Gameplay in my opinion is bland and uninspired, the turn based combat is quite slow and you are often faced with trash mobs that make the game stutter along at a slow pace. Later battles are frustratingly difficult, as you have to spend a long time clicking through the turns before you sometimes realise you haven't a hope of winning and have to reload. I eventually got sick of trying to beat a particular fight and called it quits.

Where the game shines is in its writing and story, I really enjoyed pouring over the descriptions of locations and the characterisation is pretty good in the people you meet. I find it a shame I couldn't bring myself to finish the game because I would have liked to know what happens.

So I will recommend this game to people who are into old school turn-based cRPGs, but if slow pacing and turn-based combat make you yawn you might want to check elsewhere.

It reminds me of old school games I loved. I've enjoyed the first 40 hours, and not really sure why.

Pros: Dunno, but I enjoy it
TONS of story
TONS of side quests you complete at the same time as main
I enjoyed making "black squares light up" (Exploration)

Cons:
Everything is TINY and no zoom
No camera rotation
Combat is brain-dead simple 95% of attacks are base attacks, 5% are AoE (that you can *rarely* cast)
Due to very few skills, and all be on extremely long cooldowns, combat can't get any more complex than that.
Really hard to find where side quests start
Going back to the exact same place over and over is... tedius
Need to increase runspeed when out of combat... one quest had me run across two zones JUST to read a wall to run across two more zones (Absolutely no combat until the end)
After lvl 25... I just stopped doing sidequests... ready for the ending.

I think I got this game for $2 and was pleasantly surprised. But... you *really* have to be in the mood for oldschool... or you'll hate it.