Usually action/RPG games let you pick a particular class to play before you begin. As the title goes, Avencast makes you a mage right from the start, a promising student at the Avencast Academy. And no, this isn’t Harry Potter or anything like it.
You begin as a bored student, falling asleep in class. From there on, you take on a series of tasks, initially designed to get you acquainted with the basic mechanics of the game. These tutorial missions will teach you about movement, hotkeys, quick item belt slots and of course, combat.
Movement is done by the W, S, A, D keys, while the mouse controls the way your character is moving. You can also set the camera to center or your character and follow him around, or use a free camera mode. Combat is a mix of melee with magic. You can resort to swinging your staff when your mana is low, but for the most part you will be using your spells.
Spell progression is how you customize your character, aside from the different weapons and equipment. When you level up, you gain points that you can distribute among the skills available. The skill tree dictates the type of magic you can use, Blood Magic, Soul Magic and Summoning. Blood Magic is mostly for close combat, while Soul Magic is composed of ranged attacks. Magic uses a combination of key presses followed by a mouse click, left button for Blood spells, right button for Soul spells. You can place some spells on the eight available hotkeys, but the key combos mean that you can cast anything whenever you want, as long as you know which keys to press for each spell.
The dialogues are fairly simple, there are no complicated conversation trees to get information from people, usually a few simple answers or comment. There is a good deal of voice acting too, though the characters sound very similar.
After running a few errands for some of the teachers to prove yourself (you were sleeping in class after all!), and gathering information from random characters, the academy is overrun by demons. It’s your job to fight the creatures, find their source and destroy it, while the story slowly reveals itself.
Although the graphics aren’t extremely impressive and the character models look somewhat bland, Avencast looks good and offers a good amount of different environments, with the lighting effects playing a great part in setting the mood. The spell effects are probably the best feature in the graphical aspect of the game. The lightning bolts, poison clouds, rune circles, fireballs and shock waves look impressive and very detailed. I am also quite fond of the orchestral music and enjoyed the sound effects throughout the game.
I think the most discouraging part of Avencast for me was getting used to the controls. I sure would have liked a point and click movement system and more hotkeys for my spells. I haven’t had to memorize this many combos since… since I used to play Street Fighter II. It took much longer than I expected to get the hang of it all. Controlling the character’s movements while casting spells, whacking monsters and dodging all at once takes a lot of practice and it’s not exactly as accessible for novice players as the fact sheet stated.
However, and even if the game is not too original and definitely not easy to pick up and play, Avencast has some interesting unique aspects that make it worth playing.
Special thanks to Lorraine Lue and Lighthouse Interactive for providing a copy of this title.