Various Thoughts

Ah, now this is a proper successor to Avernum. Good enough that I’d suggest completely skipping the first two Avadons to avoid the issue of retcons, if nothing else.

No wild swings in difficulty, smooth leveling progression, Fatigue now regenerates automatically (so no more battles consisting of 90% basic attacks), a sensible selection of skills without any bizarre cross-tree requirements, a varied assortment of companions with relatively frequent commentary, quite a number of choices to be made, far better integrated (non-PC) Tinkermage content, and no main quest related backtracking. The only real negatives are a couple of bugs (e.g. Healing Turret won’t work if it’s the first one you place), the game once again being blind to playing as a Tinkermage, and the persistent oddity of everyone acting like the other Hands in your party are just random mercenaries.

If you liked Avernum or anything about the earlier Avadon games then definitely pick this up, and if you haven’t played any Spiderweb Software games before then consider giving this one a chance (so long as you like turn-based RPGs).

The follow-up to Black Fortress features a couple improvements alongside a few notable steps backward. First the good and/or neutral:

The backtracking issue isn’t as bad here and the skill trees aren’t as rigid, which while seeming like minor improvements, combine to result in a game that only falls apart in the very last mission rather than two-thirds of the way through. A new class has been added (bringing with it an additional companion)… but it appears to have been invented out of whole cloth and isn’t integrated into the setting well… which is particularly glaring if you play the class yourself since no conversations will recognize it. More minor things would be the slightly improved environmental textures and poison now working correctly on enemies.

As for the bad: The companions aren’t quite as fleshed-out as the previous game’s with noticeably less comments/banter, and the encounter difficulty is wildly unbalanced.

Wildly unbalanced. While traversing an area you can go from fighting a group of enemies that deal ~20 damage a hit and take 2-3 basic hits to kill to one that deals 50+ damage and takes concentrated ability use to defeat. Or a main mission throwing hordes of enemies at you followed by one that has a relative handful. In a non-linear game that sort of thing would make sense, but this game is quite linear as far as exploration is concerned. Another related issue is the abundance of gimmick battles; there’s a lot of them and most either don’t make any sense or feature infuriating railroading.

So. Worth playing? Not if you couldn’t stand the prequel. Skipping the prequel and starting here could work though.

Released around the same time as Escape from the Pit, this first game in a new trilogy is a strange mix of better and worse attributes.

Graphically it’s superior in both the visual effect and texture department, but switches are much harder to see and it lacks any secrets/containers highlight keys. The roleplaying options are greatly expanded, but it’s incredibly linear (somewhat similar to chapters 2 & 3 of Crystal Souls) and fond of railroading you into specific actions. It features full-fledged party members with their own stories/goals, but they’re mechanically/visually just clones of the available PC classes.

Speaking of, rather than the ‘build your own class’ sort of thing Avernum has going on, this one adopts a rigid class system with specialized skill trees (and no Talents). There aren’t really any character development options beyond choosing whether you want to max out the left or right side of the tree. The skills themselves are mostly assorted combinations of the ones found in Avernum shackled with a linked cooldown system and a ‘fatigue’ (i.e. mana) cost. Abilities can’t be spammed as they can there. Which sucks and results in tiresome, same-y, basic-attack-heavy slogs instead of engaging combat. Why can’t I cast Icy Rain after Firestorm? How could anyone think putting them both on the same cooldown was a good idea?

Which brings me to a related bad idea: The endgame encounter design. What the hell is going on there? Fire-immune ‘trained’ Hellhounds that breath ice and poison? Bosses and mini-bosses that get 3 actions per turn and can spam abilities to their hearts’ content? Perpetually-respawning reinforcements? It’s horrible on every level. But wait, there’s more! Backtracking. It features backtracking, backtracking, and even more backtracking. I thought GreedFall was bad in that department (it is) yet this is so much worse.

The first pass through each main location is good, the character development is pretty good, and the early to mid-game roleplay options are good despite them having next to no effect on event development. It gave me a vibe quite similar to Tyranny… so honestly I shouldn’t have been surprised when the enjoyment level fell though the floor ~2/3rds of the way through.