I happen to be a massive fan of these games. I have played almost every game that Spiderweb Software has produced.

I was a bit dissapointed by Avadon: The Black Fortress at first but grew to enjoy the series. So far I love this new game. The controls and skills are imporved and more challenging with friendly fire added in.

Well worth the buy!

Leaving the original review unaltered below, adding some updated thoughts now that I've had time to play it more... The story and dialogue is still as excellent as I remember in past games, so I'm just going to talk about the mechanics / battles.

Vogel always iterates his system every game, and now that I've had a chance to actually get into some of the battles I'll list a few things I'm enjoying as improvements or haven't managed to update from previous Avadon titles:

+ Mana is no longer something that you just ♥♥♥♥♥ away at slowly and occasionally forces you to go touch a healing pylon. Instead your mana is an actual resource in fights that returns fairly immediately after fights. I enjoy this more from a tactical perspective, he's learned a lot that many gamers don't enjoy the survival / bar management style of things and is focusing on immediate battle stuff.

+ Hard mode adds friendly fire. I'm not sure if it also adds friendly fire to the enemies or they have it naturally, but this is a good addition to making hard mode more difficult and strategic without the 'raw numbers' problem that's occasionally plagued his earlier games.

+ Taunting actually seems to work right on Blademasters finally.

= Graphics are largely unchanged. This doesn't bother me, but don't look for graphical powerhouse here. Still, for a retro-style game I think everything looks fairly polished.

- Shops are still as worthless as they have been in every game. Money is still extremely useful to buy permanent boosts or extremely potent items that are scattered towards the endgame, but spending any money in the basic shops is just a trap that will penalize you later on.

Stil an overall very strong buy for any fans of turn based tactical combat, strong storylines, and choices with non-immediate effects that matter.


-- ORIGINAL REVIEW --
I haven't had time to fully get into this game, so this is just a preliminary review.

If you haven't played any of Spiderweb Software's Avadon games before: The brief rundown is that you're going to create a noob character of one of five available classes and pick up controllable NPCs of each of the five other available classes with their own personalities / stories. You still retain full control over the leveling / skill ups of the NPCs.

Battles can be done in four difficulty levels, I'm trudging through on Hard with what I feel is an appropriate level of difficulty. You can change at any time, preventing a difficulty spike from making you want to rage at the game unable to progress. Combat's turn based and very tactical, with most standard fights keeping to predictable mechanics and spells equivalent to what your party members have, and boss fights often like puzzles.

Vogel's writing has been honed fairly well over the years, it's often wryly humorous. If you don't enjoy reading a lot, you might want to stay away, a large joy in the Avadon games is in the extensive plot and your personal reactions to the plights of the people in the gameworld. That said, I still think there's a lot to get out of purely the tactical combat if that's your cup of tea.

Having played all his games and the prior Avadon ones, I see some streamlining of things from the prior games but most of it is recognizable. If you like small group tactical RPG action and a strong emphasis on story, his Avadon games are a good series to start with. They're not as deeply customizable as the recent Avernum remakes, which can be both good and bad. It's almost impossible to screw up your characters in Avadon, but there's only so much different you can do with them as well.

I'll try to edit this with further thoughts when I can play more, but my first hourish with the game is making me look forward to what's going to start happening.

Much like the other 2 games in the series, I can't stop playing this game.

Yes, its old-school isometric sprite graphics turn some people off.

Yes, it's a bit lacking in the sound department - background sounds, but no score or voice acting - which also turns some people off.

However, it has a huge open-world design, with lots of areas to explore, a solid storyline, and party members who have their own pre-defined personalities and skill sets. There is also an elementary crafting system, a loot system that should be easy to grasp if you've played the tutorial (or any other Spiderweb games). A worthwhile buy for anyone who loves a good, story-based RPG.

Great journey, but I am glad to be done with Avadon and it's corrupt totalitarianism. The ending (at least my ending) was reasonably satisfying, and I was impressed how the little things you achieve (or bungle) along the way are smartly picked up in the epilogue.

However, I was a bit disappointed from the map design and the battles, as someone who has played all the Spiderweb games. Avernum simply had the more interesting setting, and Geneforge the more interesting story line.

Still, I enjoyed my time in Avadon, but I don't think I want to be back there anytime soon.

i love this game. heres pros and cons i gather so far;

pros:
- great role playing, you play as 'law'. you can become good guy, or the devil.
- interesting lore & stroyline
- classic turn based fighting style.
- low system requrements.
- so many items (i have 1 guy carry bazilion skull just for fun).

cons:
- outdated graphics.
- minimal sound effect/music.

my suggestion to the developer:
- add more features (ex: fishing, crafting potion, etc.)
- add more sound effects/musics
- reduce your price for Indonesian Consumers. (its little too high compare to other simillar game)

sorry for my bad english.

I enjoy huge RPGs. I want to see loads of dialogue and exposition from characters around me. I like picking a class and building it in massive skilltrees. And the Ultima games are some of my favourites.

And yet Avadon falls totally flat for me. I'm finding it hard to put into words why, it's more of a build up of lots of little things.

Some of it is how utterly static the backgrounds are. There's things lying on the floor but you don't interact with them. You just press your inventory and they show up in an area called "on the ground". Chests and barrels are occasionally available for you to open and you can touch those, but that's it.
When you equip items they don't show up at all on your character either. Not even on their paperdoll.

There's huge amounts of totally useless items too. Mops. Weights. Bones. Limbs! I understand that they're there to add character to the world but when everything else is so static it doesn't "fit".

The dialogue trees are extremely annoying as well. I don't feel like I have choice. To find out about a quest I often have to ask everything available even if it doesn't feel like something I'd want my character to say. If I say the wrong thing there's times i've had to repeat the ENTIRE dialogue again until I get back to the point I was at.
This isn't for specific story stuff either, just random normal quests. A quest where a character wants me to find a gift for his betrothed and because I asked a question at the end of the dialogue I had to re-do the whole thing to get the quest.

And a big thing for me - if you've already done a quest you can't say that during the picking up of the quest. If I've cleared the quarry you're asking me to clear I cannot say "I did that already!". I have to finish the dialogue and then speak to the person again.
This often meant getting the quest, going to where it said and realising that I'd already done it a few hours ago. That's extremely frustrating for me.

It also autosaves extremely rarely. It's my own fault for not saving, but it's still quite annoying.

I am a fan of Spiderweb games since the first Nethergate came out in 1998.

Spiderweb offers their games as Shareware, so I gave it a try and got hooked, and still love their style 18 years later.

Avadon 3 is no exception, it is a fun, entertaining adventure game that sucked me in completely. Great story, great fights, and I even started another playthrough with a different class, which I rarely do because I get bored easily, and it is still great.

Go get this game and the first two parts of the story, and spend hours in this interesting world! Jeez,I sound like a salesperson, but honestly, I had a lot of fun.

For a cRPG fan - this game is a nice, solid portion of fun.
At first I thought that the visuals could be a bit better - but after few initial hours I totally didn't mind that.
The story is good (nothing too fancy or philosophical, but it's deep enough that you want to uncover more of it).
Turn-based fights require some amount of tactics (especially at first).

btw. Avadon 3 was the first game of the series I've played and I totally got the story and everything - so you don't really need to play the previous games to have fun with this one.

Overall - if you like hardcore RPGs - play this:)

If I could give this title an ambivalent rating, I would, but its better aspects just edge it onto the 'recommended' end of the spectrum. If you're considering buying the game, please read through the list of pros and cons.

Pros:

• Well-built world and lore
  
• Each NPC has a distinct personality, with dialogue giving an insight into their world
  
• Semi-open world
  
• Decent moral choices within the story
  
• Combat in its basic form is straighforward
  
• Encounters are scripted, which makes combat much more interesting than in some other games
  
• Classes have a unique feel to them
  
• Teeny, tiny filesize
  
• The story does improve as you go on

Cons:

• 'Infodump' at the beginning of the game (possibly negated if you've played others in the series). The conversations drag on a bit and the beginning takes on the feeling of the dreaded Tarisian Crawl.
  
• Dialogue can be long-winded for no good reason
  
• It feels odd that there's no option to customise your character's backstory, considering the number of nations that make up the Pact and the additional level of involvement this could have created.
  
• You can 'record' pieces of conversation but that shouldn't be an excuse to have quest objectives that don't update. If you load a save and can't remember if you've finished a quest, you'll have to go all the way back to the quest-giver to find out.
  
• The hotkeys don't make much sense. Both 'i' and 'g' open the inventory. Pressing 'a' opens abilities but pressing it again auto-selects your first ability rather than closing the menu again, wasting your turn.
  
• Combat can seem unbalanced, with one early fight in particular able to kill your characters before they even get a move in
  
• Some combat dialogue triggers before you've caught sight of an enemy
  
• Tinkermages are interesting to play but turrets have no directional control when you place them and no range indicator
  
• The inventory system is awful. To transfer items between characters, you have to drop items on the ground, select the other character and pick them up. 'Junk' items aren't marked as such and quest items aren't either, so you have no idea what to keep or bin. If you want to sell a lot of junk at once you have to transfer it to a junk inventory. All in all, it's a pointless exercise in micro-management and my least favourite aspect of the game.
  
• Graphics aren't anything to write home about and that's intentional, but the tilesets feel like they could use improvement
  
• One of the fonts is awful to read
  
• Character walk animation out of sync with the speed at which they walk, giving them the appearence of hovering
  
• No ambient music. Zilch. Nada. The main menu music is pretty good but that's all you're going to get. There are sound effects, but they're nothing special.

Ahh Avadon. Though I'm near the end game, I have to give this one a thumbs down. Spiderweb games are charming but walk a fine line between being too easy or incredible frustration. While this game is to tie up lose ends from the rest of the trilogy, it feels too much of a retread. The four fronts is an interesting idea, but the game never gives a sense of urgency the way Avernum 2 did where you were the underdog against an overwhelming force. Khalida and Natalie return as party companions but I really found Khalida's arc baffling compared to her in Avadon 2.

Admittedly I played a shaman this time which is still an underpowered class. Late game and admittedly some optional bosses felt too gimmicky with plenty of foes immobilizing you, summons tons of goons and the over abundance of environmental effects that damage you over time. In and of themselves they can be fine in an rpg but here are limited ways to mitigate them in this game, so all combined combat can feel annoying. Plus many foes feel like HP bloating where the result of the fight is a forgone conclusion but they take forever to die. It ends up feeling not exciting or challenging but more of a tedious chore.

Jeff Vogel fixed the leveling system and made it more streamlined (thank you!), yet in the end I couldn't be bothered to finish this. The ratio of annoyance to fun (which all games have none are perfect) was too high for me to want to continue.