It's currently 5am on saturday morning and I haven't slept yet. I'm working tomorrow but I desperately need to search these caves just that one little bit more in case there's a sneaky little goblin hiding around that corner with a nice stash of gold waiting to be plundered. This series is a classic example of 'oh maybe 10 minutes more' gaming, and you'll end up playing through the night, and the next day, and the next night until you beat it. And even if you do play for that long in one sitting you probably won't even get through half of the game.
The Avernum series, for those of you that don't know (aka everyone), is a collection of games - from the indie developer
Spiderweb Software - that shove your party of 4 into an enormous cavernous complex called 'Avernum' and leave you with rather bizarre sense of overwhelming in a 2d gameworld populated by a hoarde of palette-swapped enemies. For the purposes of this review I'm going to focus mostly on Avernum 4, with a dash of Avernum 5 thrown in, as I've beaten the former and only gotten through to the end of the demo of 5 so far.
Whilst Avernum is a beautiful looking game in it's own right, it by no means stands up to any other modern game in terms of the visuals alone. But Avernum isn't about the graphics or the directx 26 or the giant erections over a draw distance of 81m instead of 80m. Avernum's about absorbing you into a mind-blowingly deep world and lending you a scuba kit so you forget to come up for air.
I can't really touch on the story of 1-3, however 4 has you as a kinda generic group of adventurers out on the hunt for treasure, and ending up becoming entangled in a plot to save the various towns from the invasion of bloody scary shades that appear and disappear in them (the effect they have on the villagers is worth playing the game for alone). Five has you as rookies in the Empire army (read: surface army) sent down into the underground caves to hunt an assassin that almost killed the empress. The assassin is more than ready for you and you'll find yourself under attack from his sympathisers sooner than you might expect. I won't say much more than that because unlike Steel I DO think spoilers are shit.
At this point you're probably thinking 'Enough with the fucking metaphors Sarevok, what
IS Avernum?' Well alright. Avernum is a fairly standard RPG with your obligatory bundles of stats and levelling, masses of equipment and enough dialogue and story to rival that of Planescape: Torment. If you're starting to lose interest at the mention of 'st-st-storyy *shudder*' then worry not, you CAN play this game as if it was an explore-em-up meets Diablo, and just go around hacking and slashing and maiming the enemies in each region. You'll probably get the job done and beat the game without too great difficulty, but you'll miss out most of the fun and you're a total chode for doing so.
One of the things that sets it apart from most RPGs is that it plays more like a Roguelike than you'd expect. The entire game is 'turn-based' and there's no realtime involved at all. If you're standing still doing nothing then the rest of the world is too. Each time you move a square the rest of the world moves a square. Combat breaks it down even further and turns the game into a more tactical game, such as Jagged Alliance, in which each character moves in order of their speed and they'yre assigned Action Points to do whatever they will. It's this sort of game that means you don't have to fight every single enemy to grind levels to beat some killer boss; just play it smart and an extremely inferior party can beat seemingly impossible odds. But you should explore everywhere and kill every enemy, of course.
Moving onto the character creation: you've got a party of 4 to design and whilst pre-generated classes and builds are available for the maggot-infested brains of the console tards, there is the option to completely strip all computer input and customise each character with a much larger pool of upgrade points instead (this is heavily recommended). There's the standard-fare of Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Endurance evident, and then you've got the skills and abilities which are all fairly generic: Melee weapons, Bows, Mage and Priest spells, Defense, Resistances, Lock Picking, Automatic-First Aid, etc etc. There's also a wad of 'secret' abilities which you can invest in once you unlock them, by having the required stats. These are a lot more unique and exciting than your ordinary stats and definately worth a look at but a criticism of mine is that because they are secret you really have no way of knowing how to unlock them (or that they even exist) without a guide.(cough gamefaqs has it all). You can also assign a couple of traits to each character which can greatly enhance them in various ways at the cost of a huge % decrease in experience gained. There's also weakening traits to get bonus exp, but I wouldn't recommend those (unless you REALLY like to roleplay).
There's not much more I can really say about the games without handing you a video walkthrough of them, so head on over to
Spiderweb Software and grab a copy of the games. (Again I have no idea if 1-3 are any good, but starting with 4 will not leave you unhappy. They are chronological but play independant of one another). The demos have tens of hours of gameplay in them and your save can continue on from it (like with Aquaria), so if you're unsure just give it a go. By the end of the demo you'll be throwing your card at them to get further in the game.
And with that, I'm heading off back to the caves. My furry archer just levelled up and I wanna train her nimble fingers some more.
