Avernum 2: Crystal Souls Impressions and Review

I’ve been keeping an eye on the web for the first set of critiques for Spiderweb’s latest RPG offering, and while the pickings are still quite slim, I’ve at least managed to track down some hands-on impressions at Electronista:

The gameplay is pretty standard as far as RPGs go, so it’s fairly easy to jump right into. Our only real critique of Avernum 2: Crystal Souls is that there is a minimum of innovation, and players will likely be able to pick up and play through the game with no surprises, be it with gameplay or storyline. It would have been nice to see a bit of originality, but the game ends up ultimately fairly vanilla. This is not necessarily a bad thing, however.

As well as our first official review at GameWatcher, where the game scores an 8.5/10:

Although much of Crystal Souls that deserves praise is a product of the close-knit development team and cohesive vision, this inevitably gives rise to its own problems. The absence of a substantial budget to finance extensive playtesting ensures that the game doesn’t always run smoothly on more than one occasion, Crystal Souls crashed my computer on the title screen. Additionally, there were two instances in which an irreversible bug would take me to my inventory every time I attempted to open a door, forcing me to load up a previous save and repeat the section again. Luckily, the difficulty can be dropped down on the fly to alleviate some of the frustration.