Avernum 5 Review

Avernum 5 Review

Review by Alex

Avernum 5 is a classic role-playing-game which continues the point-and-click adventuring of this series.

Story

This time around the benevolent Empress Prazac life has been threatened by a failed assassination attempt by the evil mage Dorikas. He has fled to the underground realm of Avernum and it's up to you to descend to the depths and find the villain.

This is where a very interesting aspect of the story arises in that you can choose which side you want to align yourself with and get the option to switch this throughout your adventures. You can stick with the Empress and fight for a more benevolent Empire or join Dorikas in his dark works and take the Empire back to its harsher and more violent past. This also adds a great deal to the replayability of the game as you can go back and choose a different path to experience other quests and get a different outcome to the story.

Character and Party Creation

You have a great amount of leeway in forming your four character party and melding a team which works best with your gameplay strategies. You can fill up with warriors and rogues or have a caste of fire wielding mages and healing priests, or any mixture you want.

Battle Disciplines

The addition of battle disciplines greatly enhances your non-magic wielding characters as they add a strategic element, for instance using your knowledge of anatomy to make more effective strikes or tripping your opponent to make them less able to defend against your attacks. Also, the disciplines can be used whenever as long as you wait a short time for the fatigue of using them wears off.

Conclusion - A Solid Classic RPG

Overall Avernum 5 is a great example of classic RPGs and provides more of the thrilling adventuring the series is known for, such as cleaning up a mage's failed experiment, dealing with unruly bandits, and settling land disputes. While the graphics aren't the best and haven't really changed from the previous titles in the series, the expansive story and exciting quests you can partake in more than make up for this.

For those new to the RPG genre you might want to try out the rather long demo, which gives you 80 minutes of gameplay, and see how you feel about the graphics and turn-based action, but for fans of this series this title is sure to please.