Great gameplay, engaging story, good price (on sale), and BLESSEDLY SHORT. I've played pretty much every CRPG out there (Baldur's, the Fallouts, etc), I've seen it all before, and I simply don't have the patience to keep clicking and moving for 100+ hours. I've seen somepeople complain about the shortness of this game, but to me it felt just right. After finishing this game, I purchased Shadowrun: Hong Kong. This is the better of the two.
The more I play this game the less I like it
Big game, lots of flavor text, but I lost interest about halfway through, and by the end I got so tired of playing that I just set the difficulty to "casual" and face-rolled everybody. I think the problem I had was that I felt railroaded by the game despite having seemingly tons of options available. For example, in any given dialogue, you might have four different things you can say, but in reality there might be only two different outcomes (and often there's only one outcome) no matter what you choose. Granted, there might be something tweaked ten hours later in the game (and of course the ending will be different) but there's no sense of immediacy. And I'm not going to replay the entire game so I can pick option #3 in the forty-fifth dialogue so that I can see what happens later. That's just tedious. I also didn't like the skill trees. You're basically locked into a certain progression --after a certain point in the game, you're most likely going to have 6 ranks in skill XYZ and seven ranks in skill ABC ... I just didn't feel like there was much customization. And it's hard to see a significant difference from one skill to the next. I fiddled around with the intelligence stats and the different skill levels and could barely come up with a significant difference in damage for different builds of my Sorceress character. And unlike Geneforge, where you have only one character build to experiment with, in Avadon you've basically got all the classes available at any given time, so there's no point in trying to replay the game as a Shadow Walker instead of a Sorceress -- you've already fiddled with that skill tree and maxed out that character's abilities. Having said all that, I still think Avadon is a fun game. The dungeon design is excellent, the encounters are often interesting and unique, and there are lots of little tweaks (like having a junk bag for useless sellable inventory) that definitely make the game easier to play.
The game is okay, but it quickly becomes repetitive depending on what profession you've chosen. Also, the leveling mechanic for combat is a bit of a mess -- as soon as you buy a bigger ship, pretty much every other ship in the universe upgrades to your level or better, which is a real pain in the butt if you're just trying to fly from one system to the next without getting attacked by Capital-class ships. Couple this with the fact that without certain specialized skills (like "flee") you can't escape from combat, and the game quickly becomes frustrating. It's not bad, just not very good. The flavor text on the planets is probably the saving grace of this game.
This game is sort of fun, but seriously flawed. The difficulty level was a bit weird in Gothic 1, and Gothic 2 is Gothic 1 on steroids. I've never, ever had a character die as many times as I have in Gothic 2. Then, add to that the fact that the designers "fixed" the original Gothic 2 by completely nerfing the magician class and multiplying mana costs by 1.5-2x. To top it off, half the time you can't even cast a spell on a creature that's attacking you! Then add some really clunky 3D movement (monsters get hung up on objects all the time) and the often glitchy scripting (it's not unusual to greet an NPC and have a completely bizarre conversation about things you've never heard of before, then later find the ORIGINAL NPC who was supposed to give you the quest). I have no idea why so many people love this game. There are a lot better games out there.
