This makes fight stages feel a little too artificial for my taste. (On a side note, what’s with all the giant rats? Has no one in a fantasy world ever heard of arsenic?) Boss battles can feel the same way, as they are often reliant on scripted events-e.g., get his health down by 50% and cages open, releasing his pet bats. Avadon 2 is not as dependent on trash mobs (i.e., swarms of annoying roadblock enemies) as its predecessor, but they do still figure prominently enough to feel more like padding than challenge. There’s also an awful lot of backtracking between areas, made more frustrating by confusing quest markers on the map.Įncounter design also leaves a bit to be desired. (Ironically, Vogel himself has criticized his own games for being too long.) The plot naturally tends to get diluted with such a surplus of content, and while there are some great story beats in Avadon 2-particularly the exploration of crumbling bases in the titular Corruption area-the game tends to sag in the middle. It absolutely has the Skyrim problem: Finishing the main storyline alone will probably take you 40 to 50 hours, and God help you if you feel compelled to complete the dozens of hours of optional sidequests. Where Avadon 2 runs into trouble is where all Spiderweb games run into trouble: There’s just too damn much of it. Making the “right choice,” as often as not, gets you nothing. And while certain choices will net you better rewards, the game doesn’t lapse into Mass Effect-style gaminess. Like a TSA agent, you almost always have the option to attempt coercion in dialogue. The story often resonates with contemporary life: Your Hand of Avadon is presented with plenty of opportunities to overstep her bounds simply because others see her as an authority figure. The writing isn’t bogged down in lore, and generally takes on a believable, digestible tone, where familiar human conflicts-freedom vs. You get the sense he would make a terrific Dungeon Master. But Vogel adroitly avoids that eye-glazing effect by giving his fantasy world a lived-in feel, much like the original Star Wars. Normally I can’t be bothered to give the slightest of craps about political machinations in an RPG. But the empire is crumbling: Avadon was betrayed from within during the events of the first game, and in Avadon 2, you have to decide whether you’ll play a role in accelerating that demise or guarding against it. (It’s also a literal place, the hub world from which you go out on adventures.) Avadon’s role is to keep the fragile peace between a factious alliance of nation-states called the Pact, as well as to guard against external threats. Avadon itself-used synecdochically in speech, like “Washington” or “the White House,” to represent a larger idea-is a kind of police state. And on iPad, those rhythms-dragging to move the camera, tapping to direct my party-acquire a more organic feel, even if they are somewhat less precise than mouse clicks.Īs in the first game, Avadon 2 casts you as a Hand of Avadon, a sort of roving FBI agent/diplomat/mercenary working for Redbeard, the seemingly immortal ruler of Avadon. I quite enjoy the Spiderweb formula, and there’s a definite comfort in getting caught in its familiar rhythms. Aside from a few tweaks, the inventory, leveling, combat and economic systems seem essentially untouched. You’ll guide your party through environments using the same tilesets and character models, hearing the same ambient sounds, interacting with the same skills/inventory bar. Think Baldur’s Gate, but with a better UI and proper turn-based combat instead of all that pesky pausing to issue commands.Īvadon 2, the second game of a planned trilogy, is very similar to its predecessor in nearly every respect. Spiderweb games are graphically simple, exploration-heavy, text-dense adventures that demand a decent amount of finicky micromanagement. That’s not quite fair, but he has certainly nailed his formula. The first Avadon got me through more than one long flight and interminable conference call.Ĭritics of Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel say he’s been making the same game for decades. And the format made it perfect for questing on the go. If I was going to spend dozens of hours crawling through dungeons and slaying monsters in turn-based battles, I’d rather not risk carpal tunnel syndrome from thousands of mouse clicks. That’s because the original Avadon title, The Black Fortress, was such a revelation on the tablet: it was a meaty, old-school RPG on the platform I wanted to play it on.
#Avadon the black fortress ios Pc
Although Avadon 2 has been out on PC since October, I wanted to wait until its iPad release in February to dig in.
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