Facts are easy to find, this review is all emotion and feelings. Avernum is a masterpiece. A few dozen megabytes holds a massive underground world that pulls from the primary sources of the fantasy genre. The simple, clean graphics will pull you into this world of lizards, mushrooms, and magic. Run around and do quests, kill stuff, build your own special snowflake PC. It's great, and I think superior, to games based in Faerun
Spiderweb Software formed the core of my childhood RPG gaming experience, and Geneforge, along with Nethergate and Avernum, had a powerful effect on me while I was young. As a kid I had a copy of Geneforge, then a few years ago I bought the saga on CDROM. Then the CD died and I'm here on GOG buying it for the third time. Geneforge is a third person, party based, isometric RPG much like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights. However, instead of swords and sorcery, high fantasy, rootin' tootin' knights and maidens, the world of Geneforge is a fallen one, the ooey gooey remnants of arrogant scientists who thought to play God. The setting has more in common with a zombie apocalypse movie than a traditional D&D based RPG. The world is teeming with ruined labs, forgotten experiments, and people struggling to carve an existence from the harsh, hostile island to which they have been condemned. On a technical level, the graphics and story presented here are amazing, especially for being able to fit in a measly 16 megs of disk space. The RPG mechanics are well thought out, and everything meshes together to provide an experience hard to find anywhere else.
