Avernum: Escape From the Pit Review
A thorough RPG system sadly wasted behind flawed design and weak writing, Avernum is a reminder of why we moved on from the genre's humble beginnings
The game’s RPG system is fairly thorough for such a small title, including complete training trees for combat and spell maps for magic. Combat proceeds in a turn-based system which is partly dependent on the environment and provides some interesting situations and tactical possibilities, like blocking off enemy escape routes (or opening your own). Spells touch on most of the familiar ‘Final Fantasy’-like concepts, such as hastes, heals, and crowd control, and there are a variety of maladies and combat mechanics to deal with, like Slow, Poison, or Daze. But the game often doesn’t give you enough information to really enjoy the complexity. For example, you can’t see any of the stats on your enemies while in combat, only a health bar to give a rough idea of how much life they have left.
Turn-based combat is very dependent on hasting effects, but you can neither control the order of your party, nor see the current ‘queue’ of actions. You also can’t know anything about your enemies before combat encounters actually begin (and fleeing a combat situation is usually impossible). This means that the game quickly devolves into wasted time and effort: you may travel a far distance to try out a quest, only to discover as soon as you begin combat that you have no chance of surviving, and are thus forced to load your last saved game. This kind of design is especially hurtful because it means that most of the good aspects of Avernum are wasted: although there are interesting encounters to fight through, most of the game is spent testing out options and then having to reload your saved game again and again until you’re finally lucky enough happen by chance on an encounter that you can handle.
Avernum’s take on difficulty is a particular weak spot. First and foremost on the list of problems is that opportunities for grinding are almost nonexistent. Although the game does have a handful of wandering monster groups to encounter, and very small amounts of respawning enemies, for the most part if your party currently doesn’t have enough levels to take on the available quests, you are stuck. This doesn’t sound too bad except that there are no repeatable quests, so you can quickly find yourself in a position where every one of the fifteen quests you’ve accepted is too difficult, and there are literally no easier quests to attempt. It’s bad enough that any RPG requires grinding... but Avernum goes one step worse by treating grinding like a rare treat.
While stuck on the difficulty curve, most of my time playing Avernum was spent traversing the entire “easy side” of the map, double checking each of my quests to make sure that they were too difficult for my party, and gleefully snatching at any chance of a random monster fight. If you’re lucky, at this stage you might get a single fight every ten-minutes or so (and this wasn’t even the hardest difficulty). Avernum’s game tips sometimes remind you that if the game is too hard, you can always turn down the difficulty setting, but this stagnation feels much more like a design flaw than an issue of the game just ‘being tough’.
The sad part about all of Avernum’s flaws is that they stop the player from enjoying its few strengths. In nearly every respect, Avernum is outdated. This isn’t simply limited to the engine and graphics, but also to the writing, storyline, and game design. The individual combat encounters themselves can be fun enough, with a robust turn-based system and some interesting enemy combinations, but the rest of the game seems to actively get in the way of this fun. All this together means that Avernum’s primary strength is arguably its charm: playing this RPG reminded me of the nineties, and the age of shareware RPGs, but it also reminded me of why the new RPGs really are so much better. I couldn’t help but think that here was a missed opportunity. I’d consider myself a fan of the classic party-based role playing game system, and I even think the genre is a little underrepresented in the market, but Avernum sadly isn’t up to the challenge of filling this hole. The Avernum series extends for six full games, certain to be re-released in the future, but I’d be surprised if this first title inspired players to excitedly try the others out. It may be that Avernum’s failings in graphics and sounds are made up for by good writing in later sequels, but I for one am certainly not willing to wade through several second-rate RPGs to find out.
Our ratings for Avernum: Escape From the Pit on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Share:
Comments
