Avadon: The Black Fortress Review

After reviewing the PC version of Avadon: The Black Fortress, the editors at Digitally Downloaded have turned their attention to the iPad version and cooked up a review for it, awarding it the same score as the original, an impressive 4.5/5. Here’s a sampling:

It’s a big quest (you could be looking at 30 hours to get through it all), with plenty of side missions and secrets to uncover. There are a few concessions to the modern audience skill trees and a variable difficulty level that, at the lower settings, makes the game a cakewalk. In almost every other way though, this game is classic RPG dungeon hacking at its finest.

And on the iPad’s lovely screen, it looks good. Avadon is not the flashiest game, but it’s aesthetically pleasing in a retro kind of way. Icons are clear and maps are well designed. It’s a genuine pleasure to play through the game, if only to see what each new environment throws up.

The iPad also does an admirable job of replaying the mouse and keyboard with the touch screen. Scrolling around the map through swipes is a snap and tapping on the screen to direct your party of heroes to each location is intuitive and comfortable. The game does seem to be a bit of a memory drain a couple of times I’ve had the (iPad is running out of memory) message, and that can at times cause the animation and sound effects (there’s almost no music) to stutter, but it’s a minor complaint that doesn’t make the game any less pleasant to play.