Avencast: Rise of the Mage

This is a single-player title that would do well to introduce newer players to the genre, but will give veterans a nice old-school experience.

These concerns aside, Clockstone Software has crafted a magically entertaining spell-casting experience--and an unexpectedly decent game. [Apr 2008, p.67]

Avencast balances the action-oriented and traditional RPG genres better than you might expect.

After some time playing Avencast: Rise of the Mage, I discovered that sadly it's not the wizard experience I was hoping for, with all its talk of ditching maths for more shooter-style gameplay - both of which it achieves to varying degrees.

With so many typical fantasy RPGs coming out all the time, it’s nice to see something a little different in Avencast Rise of the Mage. Despite the cliché setting and plot, it manages to differentiate itself well by incorporating environmental puzzles and an action-oriented control system.

Technically Avencast got everything right: fighting is fun, interface is functional and the game has beautiful graphics; especially the spell effects are great. But the game itself is too simple, it’s almost completely hack’n slash. The action gets repetitive pretty fast, storyline is horrible collection of clichees and most of the spells are unnecessary. Still, if you’re a huge Diablo, Nox, Sacred, etc. fan, you might find Avencast attractive. [Jan 2008]

At the end of the day Avencast is a solid action role-playing game with some great puzzles and a combat system that tries to do things differently.

Avencast manages to be derivative and innovative at the same time, and the result leaves the game somewhere on the lower side of average.

For everything that it does right in a given area, it does something wrong.