Avadon: The Black Fortress Review

Spiderweb Software’s official website is pointing to a review of Avadon: The Black Fortress on Gear Diary, and while there is no score for the Macintosh version of the game, it sounds like the author found it pretty enjoyable.

Is Avadon: The Black Fortress perfect? Not at all the story isn’t the best Vogel has written, and some of the game elements could use more fleshing out. But it also has a great combat system, excellent balancing, great characters, and so in spite of those minor complaints this is my favorite Spiderweb game.

I have been very vocal about my disappointment in recent ‘˜major’ RPG games and developers: Bioware has been moving towards story-based action games with little RPG content in Mass Effect series, and Dragon Age II also took a major step in that direction. Bethesda did a very similar thing with Oblivion compared to the much better RPG Morrowind and I truly doubt that Skyrim will suddenly have robust RPG systems. Between Soldak, Basilisk and Spiderweb, RPG fans have three ‘˜indie’ game studios willing to do the hard work of developing worthwhile and robust games that fill the void left behind. I applaud them in general but with things like Din’s Curse, Eschalon Book II and now Avadon . I can more specifically applaud their efforts.

Spiderweb took a chance this year they left behind the established and well-loved worlds of Avernum and Geneforge and set out on a new adventure. Avadon: The Black Fortress is the start of a new franchise, and so far it is looking like we are in for a great series!