Avadon: The Black Fortress

Avadon: The Black Fortress review
This is a good game. It's made by a team of two so don't expect high-end graphics. What to expect are well written story and dialogue, as well as simple but decent enough turn-based battles.
I don't know why... but for some reason despite the archaic UI and lack of any kind of music, playing this game just feels like breeze, in a good way. It is not presumptuous in the least... it understands its strengths and weaknesses and does it's best to just present the player a nice and satisfying adventure. These games aren't very pricey either and I think if you like deep RPGs (and even some not so deep) you will get your money's worth. The campaigns in most Spiderweb Software games are very lengthy to be made by such a small team.
This may not be Spiderweb Software's best game but it is a good game nonetheless. I know I did enjoy the writing for the most part so far and I hope I will get to finish this game (currently I'm however stuck in a certain area so it will take a while).

Exactly what I needed - a story-heavy RPG fix with a utilitarian UI geared towards reading well-written dialogues and plot, and reasonably in-depth combat and progression systems. I've only scratched the surface of the tale - hopefully it will live up to the expectations and provide hours of immersive play and reading material. So far, after 3 hours, I'm enjoying it immensely!

The Avadon trilogy, starting off with Avadon: The Black Fortress, is another gem by Spiderweb Software. It's not my favorite by them, but it's still a very solid one where you play an enforcer part of a larger ruling system called Avadon and are given quite a lot of power to make choices and tough calls. It follows the Spiderweb Software formula to a tee being another retro-style RPG with plenty of turn-based combat but there's still a lot of cool fun and charm to be had here.

Because Steam only has a Up/Down rating and not a 'middle of the road' I'll err on giving it a positive for the interesting story and many options to change the course of what happens.
This RPG starts so easy that you left click your way through most fights with maybe an aoe spell or some healing, so easy I think the tutorial is the entire first mission. Then you hit the second area and suddenly you gotta really fight. That's great, I want enough of a challenge to think. Then the game slowly gets harder and this is also fine for a while.
You get better gear, more options, and the ability to choose all the classes plus the one you chose at the start to play as 'you', giving you a good feel fore flexible options, though one of the companions will always share your class choice, so that's either annoying or good for doubling up.
Then the enemies start spamming stuns, knock backs, charm, daze, slows, curses, and every other effect causing fights to drag if you don't focus on counter-buffing/cursing to keep them from riding on a million advantages. And, maybe it's just me, but Charm only seems to work 1/3 of the time while Daze gets really hard to rely on.
Then enemy HP bars become trees you need to saw through even if you've got the fight itself in the bag, with some bosses even spamming (group) heals so you'll need to saw through that. And their constant summon spam.
Then some enemies just get to move twice and others get that bonus while also casting buffs to move even more often, causing enemies to practically triple their action economy while slowing you to a crawl by throwing out more stuns, slows, or daze attacks. Hope you love fighting basilisk with cone-shaped aoe stuns. In groups. That eventually become elites.
The game's got a lot of great moments but eventually you just crawl through this swamp in every single fight just hoping to see the ending of it all as yet another boss just SPAMS and endless wave of foes that get to cast buffs too.
And the ending has some of the worst stun-locking jerks you'll ever encounter, alone. Because of course they had to put a rotten cherry on top.
But, then you get to see the reflection of all your choices during the entire game and a really see that they mattered. That you get to feel satisfied with the story, and if you really like the game, ready to follow their sequel bating.

TLDR:
Combat starts too easy, gets good, gets grindy, ends up miserable.
Classes are fun but buff/debuff abilities start to feel out-right mandatory near the ending.
Enemies become tree's with loads of health to chew through and self-healing spam.
The story feels fun to explore and the ending actually changes based on your choices, with fun little mistakes you can make to change the outcome.

If you really love top down games this is still gunna be worth it, but you might need some leather to chew on for when the warriors all self-buff for bonus damage/hit and the archers cast group haste before their mage hits one of your party members with a charm. Ugh.

Spiderweb Software simply never misses. Much love Jeff Vogel & Crew

Great RPG ! Well worth a play if you like CRPG

Good game!