![]() ![]() Characters are utterly flat and exist only to provide two-sentence pretexts for quests, and although there is just a smidgeon of world development in Avernum, it’s given almost entirely through flat info-dumps where your quest givers flatly explain the ecology of their local town. If the 90s’ computer RPG was born from the 70s’ paper-and-pencil ancestor, then it’s fair to say that playing Avernum is like doing a D&D session with a very boring, unimaginative Dungeon Master. It’s a story that provides a nice enough setting, but the writing in Avernum is very cheap, simple stuff. In this fantasy world all dissidents and rebels are swept under the rug (or rather, under the crust) by being magicked off to Avernum, an underground kingdom completely sealed off from the outside, populated entirely by criminals and bizarre animals, like some medieval version of colonial Australia. The only good quality of the story in Avernum is that it has a solid premise: you and your not-at-all-merry band have been banished from the surface world for some unnamed crime. So does Avernum make up for graphical simplicity with strong RPG elements and solid writing? Let’s find out. ![]() ![]() This in itself isn’t a bad thing at all: I’ve always felt that graphics were a highly overrated aspect of video games, and especially with regards to RPGs, I’d much rather play a well-written 16-bit classic than a messy, boring 3D title. The strict isometric view and indistinct figures look like something from out of the 90s. The basic story and mechanics have remained mostly unchanged, while the engine has been given a graphical makeover and new visuals, but you wouldn’t know it from looking. wasn’t Avernum released more than a decade ago?” The new Avernum is a revamp of the classic RPG title from the early 2000s, but it seems to have fallen off its horse halfway down the trail between ‘re-release’ and ‘rewrite’, meaning that while the game is a definite improvement over its first incarnation, it still looks old and unbalanced. ![]() When I heard about the recent release of Avernum from SpiderWeb software, I said to myself “Wait a minute. ![]()
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