This encourages careful players like myself to drag out trash combat, consisting of nothing more than you clicking on enemies to chip down their HP. Whereas in Avernum such fights were all about preserving HP and using skills cleverly for every fight, in Avadon you can freely sacrifice HP even if you (die) the character just pops up after combat as long as one is left standing. This sounds great on paper, until you realize exactly what it means. That said, the value of vitality over health means trash mobs are exactly what the name implies: overly easy fights that do not require you to use any skills or items to get through. For that reason, skills do not use huge amounts of vitality and there are regeneration pools at key points. Jeff Vogel seemed well aware of the necessity of preserving vitality, not wanting to force players to regularly slog back to the pillar, which is just boring. So far so good, there's nothing wrong with that in principle and it works well for the tougher fights. These pillars aren't always available, meaning the difficulty in many parts of the game should stem not from the fight being hard to get through, but rather the fight being passable without using up too much of your precious vitality and items. In Avadon, your hit points regenerate outside of combat (at a fairly high rate), while your vitality can only be restored through potions or by going to the traveling pillars. I think that newcomers to Spiderweb games would appreciate it, as it doesn't require you to be an RPG nerd to get the hang of it, and it's the first in a new series, so you don't feel like you're missing out on the series' history.Of 4 Yet I have to put yet another 'but' here. It's a step down, but still more satisfying than the action games with stats that get called RPGs these days, and I personally think it's important to support Jeff Vogel as long as he continues creating turn based role playing games.

It's got enough lore to fill out the game, and hints at goings on outside the scope of this title, so I'm eager to play the next game in the series. If you only play the demo, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's yet another generic fantasy setting, but it slowly starts to get really interesting.

The game's strength is in its story, and the way it's revealed to the player. The combat system is pretty simple in general, and there's no character creation aside from picking your class. Health regenerates outside of battle, but fatigue doesn't, so most filler battles are spent using basic attacks on each enemy so as to preserve fatigue, whereas if a character dies, they'll spring to life when combat ends. The combat has been made much easier than in previous Spiderweb games (though there are a couple of difficult boss battles) which I, personally, got frustrated with towards the end of the game. Companions are also pretty chatty and each one has his/her own special quest, and a negative Bioware influence is that you often have multiple dialogue options which have no effect on events. Jeff's been influenced by Bioware in this game (especially the first Dragon Age game), and as a result the game's story is more focused, at the expense of the sense of freedom found in older Spiderweb games. On its own merits, Avadon: The Black Fortress is a very good, if somewhat simple and linear, RPG.

Good turn based RPG for people new to turn based RPGs, or for people new to Spiderweb, but existing fans might be disappointed.

Avadon the black fortress review