Avadon 2: The Corruption

Alright. [i]Avadon 2: The Corruption[/i] is done and dusted. This is a loose sequel to Avadon: The Black Fortress and is comparable in length at about +/- 55 to 60 hours. I liked this one better than the first game. I will note that you don't really need to play the first game to enjoy this one, and only one of the endings from the first game can be considered canon regardless. Which I think is where there is a bit of an illusion of choice evident by the developer's own choice. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346665834 This one begins a few years after the events of the first game, and assumes you accepted the easier of the two main endings as your path. However, where did your character from the first game go afterwards? No idea. You will be starting anew in this one with a new character. This time around, you do have the option of selecting male or female for whichever character class you choose, and there is a new character class added. The Tinkermage. And so that is what I went with. Harmon the Tinkermage. Initially, you begin as a scout in the Contested Lands, but after certain events unfold, you are sent to the Black Fortress and are conscripted as a new Hand of Avadon, and as with the previous game, you answer to Redbeard and one of his Hearts (the Hands responsible for running day to day operations for Redbeard). And so begins your career as a Hand and the story of Avadon 2 overall. You will have the opportunity to travel to new areas unavailable in the first game, although the Black Fortress itself remain unchanged outside of the damage it took in the first game. There are new and old NPCs stationed there. The survivors of the first game and the replacements for those who didn't make it. The most interesting new area in this game is The Corruption itself, a blasted and blighted land that seems to be slowly spreading to consume more of its neighboring lands. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3346567675 Currently, the rebellion against the Pact and Avadon has gained momentum, and you are largely tasked with uncovering their specific plans and trying to stop the rebellion before it becomes a full-fledged war. Additionally, one of the conspirators from the last game is one the primary antagonists in this game, and you will expend quite a bit of effort trying to find and stop said person. You will be faced with quite a few morality decisions throughout. Some will have a direct impact on your playthrough, others will simply be notes added to the ending based on what happened. Gameplay is the same as the first game, with a few tweaks. It is still a turned based isometric CRPG, and most of the mechanics remain unchanged from the first game. However, Tinkermages have the ability to summon a small variety of turrets to help with combat in this one. And there are a couple new abilities added to accommodate the new class (along with some crossover skills from other classes). I think the main thing is the controls are simply cleaned up a little bit. Overall though, it is more of the same. And more of the same can also be said of the graphics and audio. Which by and large are maybe cleaned up a little from the first game as well but are largely more of the same. The intro music track is a little bit different, foregoing the slight discordance in favor of adding a bit of chanting. And some of the areas are different, but for the most part, this is familiar Spiderweb Software stuff. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3343749073 The writing and the story in general is quite engaging, and if you somehow did skip the first game and simply haven't played a game by this developer previously, the thing to be aware of is this is a reading-centric experience. All dialogue and everything else presented is presented in written form. And that is all done in excellent fashion. Actually, I was thinking about how these games all sort of mirror how you might run a series of shorter tabletop campaigns, where you wrap up one campaign, and the next campaign takes place in the same world and has been impacted by the previous campaign. Anyway, this is what the game is all about. Excellent storytelling and world building. Pathfinding is still an issue in this game, and most annoying is when a character will get stuck on an object. Which you might be unaware of until the rest of your party runs into an enemy, triggering turn-based combat, and you realize you are short a party member who is somewhere else on the map. And since there is no pausing during the real time overland travel, even if you do become aware of it before triggering combat, it can be a hassle to try to stop everyone else because you need to actually find the appropriate part of of the map, and one aspect of this game is constantly scrolling the map looking for landmarks to investigate and such, meaning you aren't always following your party's specific movements across a map. Real time pause for the non-combat movement is the kind of QoL addition you'd hope to see, but it is absent here. Also, while most of the puzzles are intuitive, Miranda's battle and the combat puzzle you need to solve in order to defeat her was far too trial and error IMO. In fact, had I not done something counter intuitive on a hunch, I think I would still be duking it out with her even now. And just as a separate note, I think Mr Vogel heard the complaints people had with the final battle in The Black Fortress (for the combat ending option) and made some adjustments here as a result. Which also did make sense from a story perspective as well. The result is that should you choose the combat ending, it won't be even close to as frustrating as it was in the last game. By my mind, this was a mostly stellar way to present the next addition in the Avadon series and I thought it was a lot of fun. I'll be interested to see how the series wraps up in Warborn. And if you have played The Black Fortress, I definitely highly recommend playing The Corruption as well. It's a worthwhile title and an excellent old school CRPG in general. Give it a look. 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[h2]Problems with pacing.[/h2] Narratively there are three strands of seemingly unrelated story that come together in the end. The problem is that you are locked into doing them in a linear order and you can only do a little bit of A before being sent off to B and so on. Just as you get invested in a certain plotline you're whisked away to the next one. On paper having multiple plotlines that come together is fine, but the execution along with the forced linearity makes it a jarring and unfun experience. You aren't allowed to just be immersed in any particular plotline from beginning to end or tackle them in an order that you'd find more pleasing. The stories themselves were interesting. I just think the story structure did much to undermine the enjoyment. Note: this criticism applies to the first game as well and probably Avadon 3 although I've yet to play it. Gameplay also suffers from pacing issues. The first half is fine but once you get to the Tawon Empire enemies will start to have some HP bloat. They don't become that much more challenging, it just takes longer to get through each encounter making it an exhausting experience in the long run. Especially boss fights which Vogel likes to make more challenging by having lots of additional enemies flood the arena after X turns or after the boss takes Y amount of damage. Usually what would happen to me is after dealing with the boss encounter I'd spend several more turns just cleaning up the chaff. It didn't make the encounters tactically that much more challenging or interesting, just longer. It was difficult to feel any sense of accomplishment after taking down named enemies since the encounters were just grinds to get through.

This is a Spiderweb Software game, which means a few things. Every single one of them is the sole output of one dev and his wife. Graphically it is very old-school, having been recycled through dozens of iterations, getting slightly better each time. There is no music to speak of, only ambient sound effects to set tone. If you've played one before, you know generally what to expect. Those caveats in mind, the gameplay itself is top notch. You're allowed a wide range of character customization. Most of the area boss fights are fairly epic and require you to use your noodle. Best of all, if you pick it up and like it, there are like a dozen other games like it. Each one has slightly different systems and some are on rails while others are open world, but they share a lot of core mechanics. These games are all pretty long and cost a pittance, even when not on sale. Pick it up, see if you like it.

Jeff Vogel's games are the ultimate comfortable pair of slippers. I'll end up playing through the entire Spiderweb Software catalog twice, with some games getting a third pass (Avernum 6 for starters). The Avadon series is criminally underrated. The characters, land, and overall story may be fleshed out better than any of his other series. I'm enjoying the second playthrough of this game more than I remember the first playthrough about 9 years ago. That says something!

[h1] Quite a disappointment compared even with the dull but decent [i]Avadon: The Black Fortress[/i] [/h1] I completed [i]Adadon: The Black Fortress[/i] a couple of years ago and, although I found it to be overly simplistic, extremely easy, and somewhat dull at times, I did enjoy it overall for its great sense of exploration, where every map seemed full of fun stuff to find. I was cautiously looking forward to the sequel to see what it would add or change. [i]Avadon 2: The Corruption[/i] does add an interesting twist to the dull politics of the Avadon series in the form of the Corruption, an expanding blight that eventually kills all living things it touches. It also adds a fun new class called the tinkermage, which is honestly way overpowered. However, not much else has changed, and you still spend most of the game doing the same stuff you did in the first game: traveling back and forth across the land doing errands for local powers. And this is the biggest fault of the game. It looks and plays so much like the first game that it becomes difficult to tell them apart. The extremely simple RPG mechanics and dull setting of [i]Avadon: The Black Fortress[/i] could barely sustain the 40 hours it took to complete that game, never mind yet another 40-hour game in the same exact setting (with an added wrinkle or two) using the same exact mechanics (with a change here and there). It also doesn't help that, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is much the same, this feels much more tedious than the first game. The structure of the main quest here is unbelievably formulaic, with you being sent to help out some local power in one land, then to the Corruption to track down a rogue agent, then to the next local power the next land over, and then back to the Corruption, and so on. It's been some years since I played through the first game, but compared with that game it felt like I spent much more time simply backtracking over the same giant maps I'd already explored in this game, instead of exploring new and interesting places. Combat suffers greatly here, though it was not anything special in the first game, either. Nearly every single battle (on Normal) is won by simply hitting enemies with your basic attacks over and over. Tougher encounters require you to use your special abilities, but the mechanics are so simple that you often end up relying completely on just a couple of the most useful abilities for each class. There is simply too much combat, and enemies toward the end are ridiculous damage sponges but never really any threat at all; toward the very end, every single combat starts with the enemies hasted and buffed, and you end up spending more time watching them moving around and attacking (and failing) over and over. What prevents me from giving [i]Avadon 2[/i] the same (somewhat hesitant) "recommended" rating I gave the first game is that I found the final ten hours of the game to be an absolute slog full of endless backtracking, tedious waves of boring combat encounters, and an increasing number of railroaded scenes where everything you accomplish is simply invalidated for the purposes of the story. There are even some mandatory stealth and chase sequences forced into an engine that clearly was not built to support that kind of gameplay. All in all, [i]Avadon 2[/i] is quite a disappointment compared even with the dull but decent [i]Avadon: The Black Fortress[/i], though I could see enjoying it a bit more if you really enjoyed the story and setting of the series.

I don't know why but Avadon 2 just doesn't have the allure of its predecessor. Maybe I'm too old for this now, maybe it just has a much worse story/writing. I find myself drudging through the game rather than enjoying it, so I wouldn't recommend it. The setting just isn't that interesting and feels super repetitive and pointless. I thought I had killed Redbeard in Avadon 1? So here we go all over again? (Avernum 1 was much more enjoyable -- just finished that game before starting this one).

Avernum is a collection of bite sized unique locations paced by quests and area progression. Geneforge is series of story-based encounters driven heavily by player-choice and discovery. Avadon, meanwhile, is a linear treadmill of excessive simplistic combat encounters with inconsistent difficulty, nonexistent player agency, and such a quantity of worthless loot that "g" will become your most pressed button on your keyboard. The story constantly interrupts itself as you formulaically swap between 3 main plotlines that tie together at the end. Your companions' stories exist primarily to inconvenience you the further you go into the game. Skill progression is extremely simplified to the point of feeling like a limitation and not a real customization source. The entire game is a drudgery with little of interest happening at any point.

玩了20年美式rpg我！来评价一下这游戏的《2个最失败的地方》 机本上1~3代我都玩了，是时候谈谈这款游戏的优点与缺点了 优点！游戏的故事很庞大，有点像看冰与火大片的感觉，技能！装备！魔法！升级加点都挺不错！ 让我觉得意外的是装备还能附魔：）感觉开发者很是用心，刚玩时觉得有点博德之门的影子。又有一点辐射2的黑色幽默，很不错的一款游戏， 在说一下缺点！首先我最不爽，觉得这游戏最大的败笔有几点 1！！！不能攻击NPC！！！让这款游戏玩法大打折扣！！！不是每一个人都想当救世主的。 我觉得一款好的游戏！自由度因该是完全开放的，比如在游戏里你可以拿着剑砍任何你不爽的人。当然你可以砍平民或是商人，但是你也会受到卫兵或赏金猎人的攻击！！！ 2！！！出战人数太少了，每次就只能出战4个人，有些板本还只能出战3个人。其它的人都在坐冷板凳！！！每次在大地图遇到怪就3~5只左右，真的太少了，我们人少，敌人也少，游戏的故事很庞大，但游戏战斗完全感觉不到看大片的感觉！！！每次战斗开始我方就3~4人出战，感觉开发者太小家子气。你能不能把出战人数调整一下？我觉得出战人数调到8人左右，敌方也适当增加，这会让游戏更有意义 缺点1~~~~~~~~~不能攻击NPC！！！自由度大打折扣，机本上玩了第一遍就不会再去玩了 缺点2~~~~~~~~~我方出战人数太少！！！每次3V5 完全看不到！也感觉不到游戏雄伟和庞大的剧情！建义出战人数调成8

Avadon e' sotto attacco delle forze delle Farland, guidate questa volta dal misterioso Dheless. A chi toccherà il compito di difendere la fortezza e il Patto? A noi ovviamente! Secondo capitolo di una serie di 3, Avadon 2: The Corruption ci porta nuovamente nei panni di una novella Mano di Avadon, ad affrontare una nuova minaccia per il Patto (l’alleanza formata da cinque regni del continente Lynaeus, retta e mantenuta con pugno di ferro dalla autorità di Avadon). Il nostro protagonista raggiunge la fortezza di Avadon in cerca di aiuto per la sua terra, che si torva sotto l'attacco delle forze delle Farlands. Ma anche Avadon e' in difficoltà e si sta giusto riprendendo da una recente incursione dei Farlanders, che hanno razziato il castello. Nominato "Mano", ovvero agente operativo sul campo dal Redbeard in persona (il custode e signore del castello d Avadon, nonché de facto sovrano/tiranno del patto) il nostro compito sarà quello di scovare gli aggressori, capire chi si cela dietro di loro e quali sono i loro piani. Durante le nostre indagini ed avventure scopriremo come Avadon garantisca si pace e la sicurezza nei regni del Patto, ma per farlo non si e' mai fatta scrupolo a fare ingerenze negli affari dei vari governi e ad usare una violenza a dir poco brutale, tanto da farci dubitare della bontà di questa alleanza... Rimarremmo fedeli ad Avadon e al Redbeard o ci schiereremo con le forze che si oppongono ad essa? Chi conosce gli altri altri titoli editi da Spiderweb Software, Avadon 2 e' un CRPG classico ispirato a titoli classici come Ultima, con grafica isometrica a tiles. Ad inizio gioco potremo creare il nostro personaggio decidendone solo sesso e la classe, quest'ultima da scegliere tra le 5 disponibili: Bladesmater, Shadowwalker, Sorcerer, Shaman, e Thinkermage. La trama del gioco e' decisamente lineare: sebbene siano presenti diverse quest secondarie, queste in genere si risolvono seguendo la trama principale senza dover fare grosse deviazioni. Unendo a queste anche la libera esplorazione delle varie mappe, (cosa che consiglio caldamente di fare), c’è materiale per una trentina di ore di gioco. Sebbene siano presenti diversi dialoghi con i vari NPC che incontreremo, il vero focus del gioco e' posto su i combattimenti, rigorosamente a turni e che dovremo affrontare assieme ad un massimo di 2 compagni, scelti tra una lista molto ristretta, che sostanzialmente comprende un unico personaggio per classe disponibile nel gioco. Durante gli scontri l'IA dei nemici fa il suo lavoro, anche grazie all'uso di qualche sporco trucco, nemmeno troppo celato. In particolare l'uso continuo di buff e debuff, di cui sembra poter disporre illimitatamente, al contrario di noi. E' una sfida impossibile? No, ma richiede un uso oculato dei consumabili e di tutte le skill dei nostri eroi per venirne fuori vincitori, anche considerando che il con party da 3 elementi saremo praticamente sempre in pesante svantaggio numerico. C'è ben poco da dire sul lato tecnico del gioco: e' realizzato in grafica isometrica usando (credo) lo stesso tile-engine del primo, con forse qualche piccolo miglioramento. Se siete amanti della grafica retro' fa sicuramente la sua figura, anche se da un gioco del 2013 sarebbe comunque logico aspettarsi qualcosa di meglio nella qualità visiva, anche rimanendo nell'ambito di un titolo vecchio stile per scelta specifica. Se siete amanti degli RPG vecchia scuola "duri e puri", giocare a Avadon 2: The Corruption sarà una esperienza indubbiamente interessante, altrimenti potrebbe diventare presto ripetitivo a causa dei continui, e spesso molto lunghi, da sostenere.