devilkingx2
Novice
incase you've been living under a rock, avadon is the latest game by jeff vogel(the creator of geneforge and avernum) however, unlike the quality of those games, avadon leaves much to be desired, i copy pasted the review from the official forums(i posted the review there first a while back(as you can tell from the usernames) and without further adu here is the review
EDIT: you should probably just read the orignal thread, most of my humor is lost when i copy pasted it here(the lack of strikethrough mostly)
original thread: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ub ... ber=234276
TL;DR at the bottom folks!
this game in a way is much worse than jeffs other games
in this completely objective review i shall compare avadon to geneforge because ive played that extensively but i never could get into avernum because of mechanics i didnt like
things i liked(so that people dont think that i 100% hate the game, its only 99.98%)
- improved graphics geneforge 5/avernum 6 quality or maybe even above i like them
- graphics that represent the game, when they said that red dragon wasnt that big they meant that he wasnt that big unlike how in geneforge 1 they say that one drayk you meet was like 20 feet long yet the sprite was barely bigger than the PC this goes for later ones too
- SKILL TREES! because it makes no sense to cast spell of ultimate doom III without learning spell of regular doom I first
- actual story progression, in every geneforge game except 3(which sucked in most other regards but not this one) there was little story progression the game played more like a sandbox with stats(which was still awesomesauce extraordinaire) enter G3 ruining almost everything great about the series but ateast it actually bothered to imply you were doing something other than exploring until you stumble upon something you care about
- demons, they're awesome but they werent in any geneforge but G2 and then they were mysteriously removed, probably to quell the "magic and demons in video games is the equivalent of devil worshiping and satanism in real life" crowd but whatever the reason its nice to see them back in the series, they are mythology staples
- different cultures and customs and such, it made no sense in geneforge how all of terrestria was basically the same i mean i know the shapers conquered the place, but most COUNTRIES are all ruled by their government but kansas looks different from florida which is a start contrast to chicago which pails in comparison to new york etc. its nice to see that the many lands of avadon atleast acted different
- leveling chekhov's gunman(if you dont know, things that are useless upon acquiring but become useful later are refered to by TV tropes as chekov's for some reason EX: chekhov's skill, chekhov's gun, etc.) avadon avoids the final fantasy style "this character is useless as hell now but when you inevitably leave them low level and weak because of not using them you'll be screwed when we force you later" problem by leveling those you do not use for you
- decent leveling scaling, leveling in geneforge becomes near impossible because at some point not even the strongest of the strong monsters can give you enough EXP to level reliably unless you run around "dbugkill"ing entire areas for EXP grinding purposes, i remember getting 40 EXP for killing an unbound in G5, one of the hardest beasts of teh game and it cant even give decent EXP like 400 or something? but in this game leveling is actually possible without heavy grinding or gaining a free level 2 secs from the end of the game because of what you do with the geneforge
- junk bag, the junk bag alone has to be the single greatest thing in this game, FIANLLY! no more clogging all my glorious inventory space with useless crap i'll never bother to use
and now for the incredibly large amount of bad
- SKILL TREEES!!!!!!!!!, I HATE THE SKILL TREES OF THIS GAME SOOOO MUCH!!! every single damn skill worked out like this, to get skill C you need both A and B but A is the only skill that relates to C of the two and A is the only good skill of the two, but find i have a skill point to spare- WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN I CAN ONLY RAISE SKILL C TO THE LEVEL OF THE LOWER OF A AND B? its retarded, its like saying you need to master karate to learn kendo or you need to be able to grill sasuges and brew beer before you can fry burgers
- avadon's tedious teleporters, why do i need to run back to goldcrag then touch the pylon then run across avadon then touch another pylon to go to khemeria? thats so tedious, in G4-5 you just go to a map and run across it then you can fast travel the rest of your journey as long as you've been there before but it isnt nearly as bad as
- characters and plot, why is it that all the hands but you are either dead or twiddling their thumbs until your beckoned call for a mission? why cant your 4 allies take you out on missions? why do you always have to go? why is it that convieniantly all other hands are either busy, dead or incompetent? the only one that makes sense is the dragon one because he asks for you by name because of your competence, and whats with that leader guy of khemeria? why is he not the least bit concerned that his most trusted wizzard was really an evil psycho mastermind that almost got him and the rest of khemeria screwed by avadon? and whats with the personal quests? what is this dragon age? if ima have to go risk my ass because nathalie is retarded and wants to get herself killed by a big scary dragon then i should atleast be able to bang errr romance her
- SKILLS, every last one of them sucks, the CD's are a million and 1 turns long without that cheat code, and all of the skills for the blademaster are "hit really hard and have a status effect" or the other type of skill he shares with everybody else "hit real soft but be of actual use" beserker leap and that thing the ninja guy has that attacks everything around him in a circle would be useful if not for the crappy damage
- SCARABS the only useful one i found in my travels was the one that allowed for teleporting, too bad that this isnt X-men legends 2 where when you get a skill you can actually use it to its logic limits(there are places you can only go by teleporting, and some places that require either teleporting or flying) teleporting was almost useless because you could only go places you could walk(making it useless outside of battle) and it was useless in battle unless you had more than 7/8 AP's worth of walking space directly in front of you and then it gets stricken with a like 15 turn cooldown
- the big kahuna LINEARITY the game was so linear its not even funny, you cant go anywhere unless someone explicitly tells you somewhere, because your character apparantly isnt intelligent enough to explore places and go somewhere himself, it really killed exploration for me, because i didnt feel like going back(TEDIOUSLY! as mentioned above)
- yet somehow i still didnt know what to do, i remember that mission where you need to make the 2 kingdoms get along and clear out the contested woods, holkanda and that other place nathalie is from i think, anyway you've gotta clear out the woods with 4 soldiers and the kings right hand dude, they bicker like 5 year olds(reminded me of me when i was younger, and evidently reminded me of me now) you go down and the soldiers get themselves owned by the the huge ass dragon, when you kill them all you'd expect something to happen right? something saying "quest completed" or some kind of story progression or something right? wrong, the only way you know that your done is you eventually thinking that you should leave and go talk to that other guy, who ran off(the coward) then you must take it upon yourself to check with that king if your done, AND THEN YOUR DONE you think they could've had a character go "we're done here lets go back?" or maybe i dont know put "quest complete" in the quest log, OR SOMETHING!?!?
- stark contrast of G1, in geneforge 1 there were WAAAAAY too many living tools there were just so damn many that i had to frequently sell some by the end of the game to keep from being encumbered constantly, i had to sell over 60 living tools in that game, but maybe thats because i screwed up and my guardian had like 15 or 17 mechanics and 15 or 17 leadership, BUT I RATHER THAT THAN NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND ANY!!! what the hell? why were there so little lockpicks or maybe they were just ultra hard to find, regardless you'd need a wizard(nathalie) and a ninja(that awesome guy who's clan got decimated) in your party to maximize your efficiency, even with the guide i had a whole lot of trouble finding any lockpicks in this game, probably because they look like a generic useless item like a paperclip rather than the quite unique purple hands that i found in living tools
- why wasnt the chat log on by default? seriously, i turned it on by accident, it should've been on, the only downside is the chatlog spam if you do something wrong repeatedly but even that is worth dealing with for the benefits
in the end avadon is a terrible game with good/decent trends/concepts mixed in with crappy tinkering of great mechanics, i know that this isnt geneforge and so he had to change things, mechanics, names, concepts, etc. but why was/were most if not all changes for the worse?
5 or 6/10 its possibly the worst spidereweb game(making it worse than G3, making it a acheivement, no a bad achievement, like a downcheivement) that ive played(which means excluding all of them except the geneforge series, because i didnt even get past the tutorial in avernum because the graphics of the first 3, and UI turned me off and then the movement graphics of all 7 of them)
TL;DR avadon is a terrible game with some good stuff, but in 99% of ways a step down from geneforge and presumably a step down from avernum 5 or 6/10
EDIT: added junk bag praise
EDIT 2: increased rating, i gave G3 a 6 or 7(no i havent posted a review.... yet) so ive gotta give this a more fair score
EDIT 3: changed the made up trope name i had(chekhov's character) and replaced it with the proper name
EDIT: you should probably just read the orignal thread, most of my humor is lost when i copy pasted it here(the lack of strikethrough mostly)
original thread: http://www.spiderwebforums.com/forum/ub ... ber=234276
TL;DR at the bottom folks!
this game in a way is much worse than jeffs other games
in this completely objective review i shall compare avadon to geneforge because ive played that extensively but i never could get into avernum because of mechanics i didnt like
things i liked(so that people dont think that i 100% hate the game, its only 99.98%)
- improved graphics geneforge 5/avernum 6 quality or maybe even above i like them
- graphics that represent the game, when they said that red dragon wasnt that big they meant that he wasnt that big unlike how in geneforge 1 they say that one drayk you meet was like 20 feet long yet the sprite was barely bigger than the PC this goes for later ones too
- SKILL TREES! because it makes no sense to cast spell of ultimate doom III without learning spell of regular doom I first
- actual story progression, in every geneforge game except 3(which sucked in most other regards but not this one) there was little story progression the game played more like a sandbox with stats(which was still awesomesauce extraordinaire) enter G3 ruining almost everything great about the series but ateast it actually bothered to imply you were doing something other than exploring until you stumble upon something you care about
- demons, they're awesome but they werent in any geneforge but G2 and then they were mysteriously removed, probably to quell the "magic and demons in video games is the equivalent of devil worshiping and satanism in real life" crowd but whatever the reason its nice to see them back in the series, they are mythology staples
- different cultures and customs and such, it made no sense in geneforge how all of terrestria was basically the same i mean i know the shapers conquered the place, but most COUNTRIES are all ruled by their government but kansas looks different from florida which is a start contrast to chicago which pails in comparison to new york etc. its nice to see that the many lands of avadon atleast acted different
- leveling chekhov's gunman(if you dont know, things that are useless upon acquiring but become useful later are refered to by TV tropes as chekov's for some reason EX: chekhov's skill, chekhov's gun, etc.) avadon avoids the final fantasy style "this character is useless as hell now but when you inevitably leave them low level and weak because of not using them you'll be screwed when we force you later" problem by leveling those you do not use for you
- decent leveling scaling, leveling in geneforge becomes near impossible because at some point not even the strongest of the strong monsters can give you enough EXP to level reliably unless you run around "dbugkill"ing entire areas for EXP grinding purposes, i remember getting 40 EXP for killing an unbound in G5, one of the hardest beasts of teh game and it cant even give decent EXP like 400 or something? but in this game leveling is actually possible without heavy grinding or gaining a free level 2 secs from the end of the game because of what you do with the geneforge
- junk bag, the junk bag alone has to be the single greatest thing in this game, FIANLLY! no more clogging all my glorious inventory space with useless crap i'll never bother to use
and now for the incredibly large amount of bad
- SKILL TREEES!!!!!!!!!, I HATE THE SKILL TREES OF THIS GAME SOOOO MUCH!!! every single damn skill worked out like this, to get skill C you need both A and B but A is the only skill that relates to C of the two and A is the only good skill of the two, but find i have a skill point to spare- WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN I CAN ONLY RAISE SKILL C TO THE LEVEL OF THE LOWER OF A AND B? its retarded, its like saying you need to master karate to learn kendo or you need to be able to grill sasuges and brew beer before you can fry burgers
- avadon's tedious teleporters, why do i need to run back to goldcrag then touch the pylon then run across avadon then touch another pylon to go to khemeria? thats so tedious, in G4-5 you just go to a map and run across it then you can fast travel the rest of your journey as long as you've been there before but it isnt nearly as bad as
- characters and plot, why is it that all the hands but you are either dead or twiddling their thumbs until your beckoned call for a mission? why cant your 4 allies take you out on missions? why do you always have to go? why is it that convieniantly all other hands are either busy, dead or incompetent? the only one that makes sense is the dragon one because he asks for you by name because of your competence, and whats with that leader guy of khemeria? why is he not the least bit concerned that his most trusted wizzard was really an evil psycho mastermind that almost got him and the rest of khemeria screwed by avadon? and whats with the personal quests? what is this dragon age? if ima have to go risk my ass because nathalie is retarded and wants to get herself killed by a big scary dragon then i should atleast be able to bang errr romance her
- SKILLS, every last one of them sucks, the CD's are a million and 1 turns long without that cheat code, and all of the skills for the blademaster are "hit really hard and have a status effect" or the other type of skill he shares with everybody else "hit real soft but be of actual use" beserker leap and that thing the ninja guy has that attacks everything around him in a circle would be useful if not for the crappy damage
- SCARABS the only useful one i found in my travels was the one that allowed for teleporting, too bad that this isnt X-men legends 2 where when you get a skill you can actually use it to its logic limits(there are places you can only go by teleporting, and some places that require either teleporting or flying) teleporting was almost useless because you could only go places you could walk(making it useless outside of battle) and it was useless in battle unless you had more than 7/8 AP's worth of walking space directly in front of you and then it gets stricken with a like 15 turn cooldown
- the big kahuna LINEARITY the game was so linear its not even funny, you cant go anywhere unless someone explicitly tells you somewhere, because your character apparantly isnt intelligent enough to explore places and go somewhere himself, it really killed exploration for me, because i didnt feel like going back(TEDIOUSLY! as mentioned above)
- yet somehow i still didnt know what to do, i remember that mission where you need to make the 2 kingdoms get along and clear out the contested woods, holkanda and that other place nathalie is from i think, anyway you've gotta clear out the woods with 4 soldiers and the kings right hand dude, they bicker like 5 year olds(reminded me of me when i was younger, and evidently reminded me of me now) you go down and the soldiers get themselves owned by the the huge ass dragon, when you kill them all you'd expect something to happen right? something saying "quest completed" or some kind of story progression or something right? wrong, the only way you know that your done is you eventually thinking that you should leave and go talk to that other guy, who ran off(the coward) then you must take it upon yourself to check with that king if your done, AND THEN YOUR DONE you think they could've had a character go "we're done here lets go back?" or maybe i dont know put "quest complete" in the quest log, OR SOMETHING!?!?
- stark contrast of G1, in geneforge 1 there were WAAAAAY too many living tools there were just so damn many that i had to frequently sell some by the end of the game to keep from being encumbered constantly, i had to sell over 60 living tools in that game, but maybe thats because i screwed up and my guardian had like 15 or 17 mechanics and 15 or 17 leadership, BUT I RATHER THAT THAN NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND ANY!!! what the hell? why were there so little lockpicks or maybe they were just ultra hard to find, regardless you'd need a wizard(nathalie) and a ninja(that awesome guy who's clan got decimated) in your party to maximize your efficiency, even with the guide i had a whole lot of trouble finding any lockpicks in this game, probably because they look like a generic useless item like a paperclip rather than the quite unique purple hands that i found in living tools
- why wasnt the chat log on by default? seriously, i turned it on by accident, it should've been on, the only downside is the chatlog spam if you do something wrong repeatedly but even that is worth dealing with for the benefits
in the end avadon is a terrible game with good/decent trends/concepts mixed in with crappy tinkering of great mechanics, i know that this isnt geneforge and so he had to change things, mechanics, names, concepts, etc. but why was/were most if not all changes for the worse?
5 or 6/10 its possibly the worst spidereweb game(making it worse than G3, making it a acheivement, no a bad achievement, like a downcheivement) that ive played(which means excluding all of them except the geneforge series, because i didnt even get past the tutorial in avernum because the graphics of the first 3, and UI turned me off and then the movement graphics of all 7 of them)
TL;DR avadon is a terrible game with some good stuff, but in 99% of ways a step down from geneforge and presumably a step down from avernum 5 or 6/10
EDIT: added junk bag praise
EDIT 2: increased rating, i gave G3 a 6 or 7(no i havent posted a review.... yet) so ive gotta give this a more fair score
EDIT 3: changed the made up trope name i had(chekhov's character) and replaced it with the proper name
