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Game Review by Gus L
Game Rating = 1/5
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When I first saw this game, I was amazed. I thought to myself, what are these graphics? Hello, Spiderweb Software, this is 2008! We do not have isometric graphics in new games now. We have World of Warcraft, Halo, and Everquest. We have a lovely little thing called ADVANCED 3D ANIMATION.

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But then I realized something: great games don’t have to have beautiful graphics. I remembered an old saying: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” I added a twist: “Don’t judge a video game by its graphics.” A game can have a lovely plot, an easy-to-use interface, wonderful game play, and bad graphics, and still be pretty good. I was with this hopeful mindset that I started playing Avernum 5.

Sadly, my hope were quickly dashed. I started trying to move my group around (one weird quirk-the player leads a group of four, yet you are referred to as one person during dialogue), and failed miserably. I clicked on a ground square (the terrain is tile-based), and my group moved to it, taking up half the screen as they went. I found a couple of my group memebers off the edge of the screen, and no way to see them all. Sadly, the game did not automatically shift the camera to view the entire group. Although a small fault, it was quite annoying. I finally found what to do: nudge my mouse to the edge of the screen. But this moved it too far to the side, and it took quite a while to get it right. And this wasn’t the only interface problem. I don’t know why, but I find zooming a really helpful feature in games. You can get a sense of the area when zoomed out, and then zoom in for combat scenes. Sadly, no such feature was available, and I was stuck with an incredibly zoomed in scene which was very hard to navigate.

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I was hoping the story would at least be good. And it was… for a third grader’s first novel attempt. The whole plot is fairly cliched, with the good empress attacked by the evil assassin. You, the hero, go and try to find and kill the assassin. The demo didn’t get far enough, but I can imagine the hero saving the world from some ultra-huge treachery (think evil twin/spouse/child). Plus, the dialogue was incredibly stilted, with the stupidest jokes and most obvious “secret hints”.

The audio was even worse, really strange and unnecessary. Often I find it more fun to listen to a game with the volume on. This was not one of those instances. The fight scenes sounded like a cacophony of boxers grunts, and the music was unrecognizable at best. The worst things were the background sounds. In one city I visited, it was combination of dog barks and what sounded like half-dead people saying “Ewwwww!”

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It most certainly deserves a score of 1/5. It’s graphics were blotchy, it was impossible to navigate, the story was ugly, and the audio was hideous. Hey-in a genre of many good RPGs, it should get points for being uniquely horrible. I would certainly never buy it, but still, at only $28, it’s a relatively cheap, bad diversion!

System Requirements

PC Running Windows 2000 or later or Macintosh running System 10.3.9 or later.
50 MB free RAM.
200 MB hard disk space.
1024×768 screen resolution with 16 bit color (Windows) or 32 bit color (Macintosh).
Avernum 5 will run natively on Intel Macintoshes.

Spiderweb Software created Avernum 5.

Tags: Role Playing Game //