Although I didn’t receive the privilege of reviewing it back when it first released, personally I was not much a fan of Spiderweb Software’s Avadon: The Black Fortress. As much as I have appreciated Jeff Vogel’s hard work on the Avernum and Gengeforge series, Spiderweb’s newest franchise didn’t resonate with me. But, there’s always room for growth and improvement in sequels. And, as Avadon was Spiderweb’s best-selling game to date, clearly there were fans who enjoyed it.
Avadon 2: The Corruption is the brand-new Spiderweb Software title in their parade of what seems like yearly releases and remakes. With the foundation laid in the original Avadon, I was eager to see whether Avadon 2 would improve upon that foundation in ways that would attract fans of other Spiderweb franchises, or keep those same old flaws that turned me off from the first game. After playing Avadon 2 start to finish over the last week, my unfortunate answer has to be “mostly, no”, but that doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had with Avadon 2 as well – read on and I’ll explain how that is.
Setting & Story
Avadon 2 takes place a few years after the original game’s story. The titular fortress, Avadon, is an all-powerful authority in the lands of the Midlands Pact, a collection of states which give up a degree of their autonomy in order to preserve peace both internally and externally. In the wake of an attack on Avadon itself at the end of the previous game, Avadon has been left weak, its leader Redbeard struggling to rebuild while threats hope to prey upon it.
Things don’t start out in Avadon for you. At the beginning of the game, you play as a lowly scout in the Pact army, being trained by another senior scout (either male or female, opposite your gender choice). Following a routine patrol, Rockridge Keep comes under attack by a rebel army of titans and wretches. Your scout trainer is knocked over the head and hauled off by the enemy, and you are dispatched to Avadon to report the assault on the keep.
It doesn’t take long after arriving at Avadon to be hired – or conscripted – into its ranks as a Hand, a warrior acting above the laws of the land in service of the Black Fortress. As you rise through its ranks and perform mission after mission, you will fight back a rebel uprising, hunt down the traitor who attacked Avadon in the first game, and withstand an invasion by an old empire. The three plot lines take turns alternating in focus, much like in the original game, but intertwine with one another and certainly aren’t unrelated.
Structurally and narratively, Avadon 2 is very similar to the first game. Like the original, you play as a Hand in service of the Pact. Like the original, the story follows a very linear path which you have little influence over. Like the original, the narrative is driven more by characters than broader events, as seen in other Spiderweb games. And, like the original, you deal with the many political conflicts that arise from Avadon’s domination of the states under its authority – many of which are morally grey, and come into conflict either with your goals, or those of your companions along the way.
This focus on morally grey political situations is Avadon 2’s biggest strength, as far as its story goes. The story provides you many opportunities to side with or against many involved parties, and additionally makes a bigger distinction between the Midlands Pact, Avadon itself, and its ruler, Redbeard, as all three dimensions are called into question rather than just one. Jeff Vogel, though not the flashiest writer when it comes to dialogue, knows how to create interesting scenarios for events to take place in.
But, while these smaller individual situations and scenes found in the game are often quite interesting, the wider plot unfortunately feels like it’s taken a back seat. Avadon as a setting is extremely generic, and while The Corruption has expanded it somewhat, the political drama that makes up its more interesting subplots isn’t fully realized in the main story, which instead devolves into a similarly generic “save the world” plot that’s one step short of featuring a doomsday device. I do think it’s better than the first game’s story, which I found extremely slow-paced and uneventful – but it’s still not that great, either, and lacks a lot of the mystery and sense of discovery of other Spiderweb games.
What’s more, Avadon 2’s story constantly resorts to frustrating contrivances. There are close to a dozen times throughout the game where villains twirl their mustaches and cackle from behind magical plot armor, and even in those situations where you may be allowed to act, the game gives the enemy an absurd number of hit points and protection spells to stop you from messing things up (which, of course, you can never get yourself). There were also several instances where my party was captured by the villains in a cutscene, and in one case subdued by the same types of enemies that I’d already slaughtered dozens of with ease. This inconsistency between game mechanics and story happens time and time again, and in my opinion, runs contrary to the core principles of computer RPGs.
There’s also a lot of little nits to pick which show Avadon 2 may not have received as much attention as it could have in the story department. There’s a ham-fisted, awkward romance sub-plot shoehorned in that keeps popping up whether you care or not, there are still tons of “fake” choices in dialogue that have no impact on how events play out, and the ending feels very rushed, acting as a blatant sequel setup rather than a satisfying conclusion. Additionally, while Jeff Vogel has constructed a character-driven story, unfortunately his writing often doesn’t provide those characters with interesting back-stories, motives or personalities, both allies and enemies alike – while the villains are probably the most one-dimensional, the companion characters also feel like they were picked off a shelf, most of them falling into the “arrogant and egotistical” or “mysterious and brooding” camps.
Character System & Combat
If you’ve played Avadon, or any other Spiderweb Software title, for that matter, you’ll be right at home with Avadon 2. The character system from Avadon makes a return with few real tweaks, and combat is still turn-based and grid-based. Its biggest new addition is the Tinkermage character class, who joins the existing classes (Blademaster, Shadowwalker, Sorcerer, and Shaman), and sets up mechanical turrets and totems to provide buffs, debuffs and spit fire and ice at enemies. I picked Tinkermage for my main character, and enjoyed how versatile it was, either focusing on support or offense depending on the situation. Another welcome change is the ability to pick your character’s gender rather than being forced into one depending on the class you picked as in the first Avadon, though it has no real gameplay effect.
Avadon generated some discussion on its release due to its highly modernized approach to RPG mechanics, compared to the fairly complicated character system found in other Spiderweb games. Non-combat skills were almost entirely stripped out, attributes were pared down to the basics of Strength, Dexterity, Endurance and Intelligence, skill checks completely disappeared, and the game even adopted knock-out and post-combat health regeneration ripped right from BioWare’s Dragon Age.
I’ll say right now that I am no fan of this approach, because I feel it both overly simplifies gameplay by making resource management much less important and attrition almost non-existent. Unfortunately, Avadon 2 has kept all of these systems and has not seen fit to improve upon any of them. The character system is the same and advancement is just as limited, with your character at best going one of two directions down the skill tree – “jack of all trades” builds are too heavily punished to be viable. Because it’s not possible to increase a skill to a level beyond the preceding skill in the tree, the skill system reduces the variety of character builds, and the lack of non-combat skills means there is no way to add secondary or “flavor” abilities.
The actual combat itself in Avadon 2 is actually a step up from the last game, in terms of encounter design. Combat against regular enemies tends to be very boring and uneventful, with little strategy required short of luring enemies around corners one-by-one, spamming area-of-effect spells, and buffing your party up, and as the game goes on these trash fights succumb to hit point bloat and pointless repetition. However, the addition of Tinkermages doesn’t just mean you get to use turrets and traps – it also means many areas feature mines, blade throwers, and other mechanical obstacles that present some interesting challenges. Enemy Tinkermages also present more potent threats, and many encounters combine both stationary traps with standard enemies. There are also a number of fights against bosses and unique enemies that, while often heavily scripted, require the use of special one-time mechanics to complete. These fights are often very engaging, and towards the end of the game, challenging in a way that doesn’t feel cheap or frustrating.
Quest Design
The limited character system, in my opinion, has some significant repercussions for overall scenario and quest design in Avadon 2. The lack of non-combat skills means that the game’s focus is almost exclusively on combat when you aren’t chatting with a character. Predictably, this gets incredibly boring, because the game’s areas are often quite large and sprawling, but there’s nothing to do in them but fight – even with the improvements to combat and decent encounter design and pacing, there’s tons of trash enemies to wade through, and these are simply not much fun to deal with.
Furthermore, this conflicts with the more focused, narrative-driven formula. In Avernum and Geneforge, the non-combat activities and mechanics tended to be more varied and interesting to make up for the lack of story; in Avadon 2, if most of the superfluous combat was removed, it’d be a 20 hour game instead of a 60 hour one. The addition of a few skill checks and non-combat skills, with secret areas and hidden stashes to find, maybe a puzzle or mystery to figure out, would have helped break up the monotony a lot, but there’s none of that to be found at all.
Earlier, I mentioned that Avadon 2 is a very linear game. What I didn’t mention then was that it’s often linear to the point of being frustrating and outright illogical. Due to the way the game is structured, you’ll often return time and again to the same areas, and new quests open up for you each time. In theory this means the world itself feels a lot more alive and you’ll never be wanting for side-quests.
In practice, Avadon 2 will cut off stages in its quests arbitrarily, simply because it’s decided that you’re “not ready” for the next stage. This happens even within quest chains, not just for individual quests, and can be a huge time-waster and immersion-breaker. One especially absurd example is a quest to hunt down a prisoner who escaped deep into Avadon’s dungeons. After I chased him and fought his minions, he ran beyond a gate and locked it behind him. Yet when I returned to the quest giver, the character refused to let me continue the quest, informing me that I was suddenly too weak to continue, even though I had just been on the same task. This happened not once, but three times for this same quest, and in the meantime I had to keep heading back to the quest giver to see if I would be allowed to proceed or not. I understand the goal is to prevent players from taking on content above their ability to complete (which in itself is something I object to in an RPG), but in many cases absolutely no effort is spent on justifying it logically.
Another related issue is that the game will often only allow you to explore a location or meet a character once a quest has started – this can get especially silly, with solid rock walls inexplicably opening up to reveal new paths, or quest-critical characters being added to a location you thought you had fully explored. What’s more, the game provides minimap markers for quest objectives, but only some, and it’s not clear why for one quest I need to spend 20 minutes roaming an area I’d already explored five hours before just to find the one new thing in it, while another tells me exactly where to go. I found several quests unnecessarily difficult due to these annoyances and oversights, rather than any challenge in the quest content itself.
Presentation
Avadon 2 use the same engine as the last generation of Spiderweb Software games. This means, as usual, attractive-but-simplistic tile-based sprite graphics with an isometric perspective, point-and-click interface, minimal special effects, a limited number of hand-drawn portraits and vignettes, and a lot of text to read through. But, for fans of this style of game, the sparse graphics are not necessarily a serious complaint – they’re are functional and effective, and with Avadon and Avadon 2 the consistency and variety of the art assets are much better than Spiderweb’s earlier games. This is definitely Jeff Vogel’s best work with respect to visuals, for what it’s worth.
Avadon 2’s sound work, unfortunately, is really starting to show its age. While the game has a decent opening theme song, much like other Spiderweb titles, there is no in-game music, sound effects are basic and of rather low quality (many dating back 10+ years to Spiderweb’s earliest games), and the same old ambient sound loops are used again and again. I realize that as an indie studio, Spiderweb’s resources are limited; however, Avadon is Spiderweb’s best-selling game, and after over a decade of the same minimalist approach to sound, it’s starting to get very boring if you’ve played more than one or two of these titles. Some brand-new sound effects and an actual soundtrack would have gone a long way to improving Avadon 2’s aural experience.
The user interface in Avadon 2 is just like past Spiderweb games: sparse, functional and effective, if lacking in bells and whistles. There are liberal hotkeys available, the junk bag feature added in Avadon makes a welcome return, and overall it’s well laid out and easy to understand. But, there are a few niggling issues and missing features. For instance: you can’t close a menu by pressing the same hotkey used to open it; the combat grid is quite small, and it’s too easy to mis-click the wrong spot or accidentally click your controlled character and skip your turn; the character screen is missing many important details, such as which attributes govern what skills; there’s no volume controls available; the game requires a restart to change screen resolution or display mode; the mouse wheel can’t be used for scrolling lists; and there’s no way to rebind keys. While the engine still does its job, these little issues have existed for a long while in Spiderweb’s games, and it’s high time they were fixed.
Conclusion
Overall, Avadon 2 is very much more of the same for Avadon. What Avadon did well, in its interesting political situations that tread morally ambiguous ground, is still alive and well in Avadon 2, perhaps even better. There are also some enjoyable side-quests and a few companions I liked, even though a few too many characters were too bland and stock for my tastes. The Tinkermage character class is also something different and is more interesting to play than most of the other choices, too. Even though the overarching story itself is not very interesting, it’s still a step up from the first game’s.
Yet, Avadon 2 also maintains all the same issues the first game had in spades. There is too much of a focus on combat, and the combat that does make up most of the gameplay simply isn’t very good most of the time. The quest design is often absurd and illogical in the way it cuts off opportunities from you arbitrarily. There’s still an over-abundance of purely cosmetic choices, where a line of dialogue will change but the end result will be identical. And perhaps worst, it’s simply too big and bloated for its own good, and doesn’t have enough for the player to really do – that Diablo-level of depth to the character system really does lead to a mechanically shallow game on the whole.
Avadon found its niche of fans, of course, and Avadon 2 will still please those players who want more of the same, but as a sequel, and Spiderweb’s umpteenth game overall, I feel these issues shouldn’t be overlooked. At $10 on Steam and GOG, and $20 at Spiderweb’s official site, Avadon 2: The Corruption still follows the Spiderweb mantra of providing a lot of game for your dollar, and I still do appreciate Jeff Vogel’s incredible effort in building such huge RPGs with such a small team. But, take away the sheer size and ambition of the “one-man RPG studio”, and the game both comes up lacking next to Spiderweb’s excellent Geneforge and Avernum games, and unambitious when taken as a sequel to the first Avadon.
