GNT: Nostalgia is a sensitive, two-sided coin. Applied to the right games, and you can take a trip down memory lane with a smile on your face, recalling each wondrous gaming moment after another. At the same time, it can make a game feel sluggish, tired, and overall extremely dated. As unfortunate as it is, Avernum: Escape from the Pit falls into the latter category. Avernum is an isometric, traditional RPG dungeon crawler that ended up falling a few crayons short of a whole box. In fact, the game is really only running on the eight basic colors. A worn out game system will find a home in the hearts of older generation gamers (possibly), but in this day and age, really does not hold up to the kind of content we are seeing today.
TouchArcade: Hello, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the magical and mysterious GDC week last week. Normally, the RPG Reload Pocast will go up on the first Monday of each month, but with GDC that didn't quite pan out. However, better late than never, and this time around, our main topic is Avernum: Escape From The Pit [$9.99 (HD)], which I covered in my RPG Reload column two weeks ago. It's a really interesting open-world RPG done in a classic style which is oddly coming back into vogue of late.
TouchArcade: This week, we're looking at Avernum: Escape From The Pit [$9.99 (HD)] from Spiderweb Software. It's a game with more history behind it than you might think at a glance. Released on Mac in late 2011, with Windows PC and iPad versions following a few months later, it's a remake of Avernum, released in 2000, which itself was a remake of the 1995 game, Exile: Escape From The Pit, Spiderweb Software's first release. Spiderweb Software has been consistently releasing indie RPGs for almost 20 years, a remarkable achievement all on its own. Ultima did not survive, Wizardry somehow transformed into a largely Japan-only niche series, Interplay and Black Isle are both essentially past-tense, and even Bioware seems to be less interested in the kind of games they used to make. Spiderweb Software, on the other hand, is still here, and the company doesn't look to be going anywhere.
Hardcore Droid - An RPG could be an enormous decade-spanning epic or it could have almost no plot at all. It could have a well-written main character or it could have a character that you created. It could be an open-world first person shooter or it could be a top-down, pixelated dungeon crawler—it’s the most experimental genre of games and the most diverse.
Poor review. You knock the game for aesthetics alone? Did you play the game enough to realize the strengths? Fantastic story writing, excellent itemization, deep character customization and multiple story driven endings (unlike the cheesy ME 3 version of multiple endings...).
If the basis of your review is that the game didn't meet up with Dragon Age 2 or ME 3s cut scenes or state of the art graphics fair enough...but there is far more to a role playing game than aesthetics...if you had looked at these other factors the game more than competes with todays RPGs...in fact it likely outclasses them in those areas.
4/5