Avadon 2 is another great game by Spiderweb.
If you played Avadon 1, you should get it straight away. The first one was good, but it was rushed and it can be seen when compared to the next title.
Somewhat simplified gameplay, if compared to Avernum or Geneforge series, but offers the same book-like rich story and challanging battles, moral dillemas and... lots of loot, big world and pure fun :)

Highly recommended.

Gonna be honest - it isn't much to look at. It is, however, a strangely engrossing and surprisingly complex (in some ways) RPG, which has more life in it than you'd expect for a game that looks the way it is. If you'll forgive the fact that Spiderweb Software have been using the same assets for over a decade, you'll find a decent game with a solid story and decent gameplay mechanics. A minor complaint for me is that combat is too easy (and this is coming from someone who had to cheat to beat Baldur's Gate) even on hard, but it wasn't too much of a barrier to my enjoyment of the game.

The first 10 hours of Avadon 2 brought me back to the old days circa Ultima IV, suggesting a sprawling world full of ethically ambiguous side-quests and NPC’s. Although the full game doesn’t quite live up to its initial promise, it’s still a solid CRPG experience overall.

The graphics are like something straight out of the early ‘90s, and you’ll either find that charming or off-putting depending on your taste. I lean a little more toward the former, and although I did miss the ability to rotate my camera view a few times, overall the low-fi look didn’t detract from my enjoyment at all.

What did put me off the game a bit is how the story arc kind of fizzles out not even halfway through. What starts out feeling like an interesting thicket of subplots and opportunities for interesting decisions ends up really boiling down to one grand choice of “taking sides,” expressed over and over again in pretty much the same way.

The game is also quite long, and although the tactical combat isn’t terrible, it’s not quite rich or varied enough to stay fresh through 60-70 hrs of gameplay. The last third of the game was a bit of a slog, and although the battles were ramped up both in scale and difficulty, they felt more tedious than climactic.

Still, it’s a solid game, and though I don’t see myself playing through it again, I might come back in a few months to check out something from Spiderweb’s back catalog.

Avadon 2 very much takes the "more of the same" approach to sequel writing. It has everything the first game had, only bigger areas, more side quests, new classes, and more companions. Unfortunately, I've never really liked the Avadons as much as I have some of Spiderweb's other games and I think I've finally worked out why: they are games about politics where there's really not a whole lot at stake that's interesting. This point sticks out more than it otherwise might given that Spiderweb has already done politics heavy RPGs so superbly in the Geneforge games. In the Geneforges, each political faction was modeled around answers to central ethical and philosophical questions about the nature of personhood, human rights, eugenics, and power. This makes each of the factions not only easily identifiable, but immediately engaging as the issues at stake are so emotionally charged and relevant to our own world. The brilliant thing about the Geneforges is that they use their faction systems to rigorously dissect these issues from a variety of different angles, continually muddying and graying them so that you often find yourself taking ethical positions that you'd never thought you'd take a few hours (or games) earlier.

In contrast to the Geneforges, though, Avadon's political squabbles tend to be over much more dry and mundane things like land and political rule and the moral and ethical stakes are never as clear or well defined. While the games do delve into the question of how much freedom citizens should be willing to give up in exchange for safety, the issue is never really tackled with much rigor or emotional resonance. Likewise, the various political groups themselves are not as philosophically distinct and tend to blur together as a consequence. Which ultimately makes it hard to choose sides, not because of the presence of any moral ambiguity, but because of the absence of any reason to care. It's very hard to get invested in a plot that is, ultimately, about nothing more than squabbles over who gets to control digital land in a digital fantasy world.

All that said, when it comes to being not as good as the Geneforge series, many, many, RPGs fall short. So I don't mean to suggest that Avadon 2 is a bad game. I enjoyed it a great deal and if you like turn based, party focused, RPGs you probably will too. It's just disappointing as I know Spiderweb is capable of doing way better.

A good follow-up to the first Avadon and another fine entry in the Spiderweb Software catalogue. The graphics are bad, the sound is terrible, and the presentation leaves a lot to be desired... but the writing is great, the story and setting are interesting, and the game is a fun old-school RPG. I suggest listening to some good instrumental music and playing this with all the sound off. There's a lot of reading.

Recommended, if you can get over the bad aesthetics and are looking for an old-school RPG.

Avadon 2 is the direct sequel to Avadon: The Black Fortress. You take control of a new band of heroes as you wield your might on behalf of Avadon.

Battles are turn based and are governed by action points, which are expended through both movement and use of skills. As expected, health and stamina bars are also present alongside four core stats - strength, dexterity, intelligence and endurance. Additionally each character also has resistances to four damage types and four possible status effects. Character builds are developed using a skill tree, which requires you to pump more points into particular branches if you want to reap the full benefits of a particular branch. There is a retrainer NPC who allows you to redistribute all your points if you are ever unhappy with your character build, but you need to reach a particular point in the game before they become available. There are five possible classes to choose from for your character, with Avadon 2 adding in a new class, the tinkermage who specialises in creating turrets and machines that can aid you in battle. The entire cast of characters comprises one of each class type so you will always have the potential strengths of each class at your disposal throughout the game. Avadon 2 features a standard grid based inventory management system, a junk bag for storing useless items so they can be sold en masse, several slots for character equipment, scarabs slots (magical items which confer statistical bonuses and abilities), quick use skills and items for each character. Overall inventory management is fairly painless however during extended periods of adventuring, managing the many scolls and potions you find can be a chore but compared to Spiderweb's older titles it's like a gift from the gods.

Overall, the Avadon series is weaker than the Geneforge series and more linear than the Avernum games but it does possess its own strengths, particularly if you prefer adventuring with a party of character who speak with each other and have actual personalities. Like in the original Avadon, you're going to be revisiting 3 main areas of the world 3 times each, each time with a different reason. I'm happy to say that this time around the rationale is less infuriating than Avadon 1 (a particular questline in Avadon 1 basically boiled down to a dragon being upset on your first visit, the dragon's upset AGAIN on your second visit and on your third visit - guess who's upset again... and you end up sent on a convoluted quest for a fairly weak reason each and every time. After playing Spiderweb's other games, I expected better than this so I'm pleased to say I was never rolling my eyes when asked to revisit a location in Avadon 2). Still, compared with Spiderweb's other games revisiting the same locales may be somewhat off-putting. I should clarify that you're not revisiting the same maps over and over, but instead exploring new locations in each distinct region of the game.

One thing I'd have liked to have seen addressed in this sequel is the player character instantly being shipped off to the next location immediately upon their return from each major quest, sadly that is once again the case here. This squanders a great opportunity to experience some downtime in Avadon and to deepen friendships and bonds with other party members as well as make better use of Avadon as a central hub. As it stands, it makes things feel very "gamey" and Avadon merely serves as a crossroads between destinations.

Avadon 2 is a sizeable game, it is fairly linear throughout but there are plenty of optional sidequests that can be attempted throughout the game, character quests for each of your party are interspersed through the game and serve to break up the main questline with some interesting little detours. Portals in Avadon's central keep allow you to travel between major locales in the game at any time, so you're never in danger of locking yourself out of particular quests. The writing is pretty strong throughout, the descriptive text (always a high point in Spiderweb titles) is top notch once again, sadly there's only minimal interaction between party members, it would have been nice to see some conflicting voices raised a little more often as in Geneforge 3. The story ramps up nicely over the course of the game and kept me playing till the end, it does suffer a little from being the middle game in a trilogy but Avadon 2 handles itself fairly well on the whole. I did notice a lot more humour and light-heartedness sprinkled throughout this game compared to Avadon 1. Tonally, I also noticed quite a difference between this game and Spiderweb's previous titles and I'm not convinced it's a change for the better.

Although the trash mobs which plagued the original have been toned down somewhat in this outing, they did slowly start to creep back in towards the later parts of the game. There are some foes that have very large HP pools and are also buffed to take several turns for every one of your own, when fighting these enemies in large groups, it quickly becomes tiresome waiting for your turn to come back around while the enemy horde dominates the round. Boss battles, while few in number, form the most interesting encounters in the game by far, each of the mandatory bosses in the story line were fun and challenging to fight.

Some old faces from the previous game return but there is no mention of your previous party from the last game, which again was disappointing considering the Avadon series greater focus on party interaction, a callback to the old crew would have been much appreciated. There are plenty of choices in Avadon 2, the vast majority of them are for flavour and building the character you're playing as, which is fine, there's a small amount of branching at work at particular points late in the game but like with Avadon 1, I didn't feel as though I personally was having much of an impact on the game world.

Ultimately it's a decent game, it is very much the sequel to Avadon 1 and makes most of the same mistakes but it does also broach some new ground. The game's premise hints at something greater if the developer were to merge the open structure of Geneforge with the party based system seen here in Avadon but at least in this outing, we only get halfway there.

Pros:
-Good writing in general
-Quite open though it's a linear game
-Good Combat system
-Interesting story
-With more than 50h gametime quite big

Cons:
-very basic graphics
-no background music
-A couple of quests are badly executed
-Some Balance issues making the game too easy
-clumsy interface

All in all a good game if you can accept the graphics and lack of music, especially considering the base price is below 10 bucks already.

German video review at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU-AlsDCxwQ

$10 for 80 hours of content on a single playthrough should be enough for you to run and buy this game.

Jeff Vogel and company continue to produce a quality product that satisfies my desire for world exploration, solid story telling and turn based party combat.

Old-school, turn-based party combat with a vast worlds and huge story.

That Baldur's Gate, but indie and made by one man.
Crude, but potent graphics, excellent story and gameplay. A rich and satisfying world. Great writing and playerchoices.

One of Spiderweb Software's weaker offerings. The combat feels like a slog, with too many fights that seem to only pad out the game, and too many gimmicks in the more serious fights. The plot is not particularly engaging, and I could not really bring myself to care about the things going on. Finally, the ending was anticlimactic.

Play one of the Avernum or Geneforge games instead.

classic RPG. Rainy day outside, get a coffee, some junk food, turn the heater on and get lost in this for some old school fun.

Avadon 2 reminds me of a solid D&D adventure in a tactical RPG. You have lots of bonus missions to do, several different characters to choose from for each adventure, a good story with lots of choices and you'll die A LOT! I'm far from the best at tactical RPGs, but I had to ramp the difficulty down from normal to easy to casual so that I could get past different parts of the game.

I'm writing this review 24.5 hours into it and I'm only about 30% through the game! $9.99 (or less if it goes on sale) is an absolutely worthy value for the time you'll get and the quality of game play you'll get out of it!

A deliciously old-school party-based RPG. Challenging and engaging turn-based combat, as well as interesting characters and factions to meet (although the Avadon series is fairly hack-and-slash compared to the author's Geneforge series). On top of it all, it's got awful isometric graphics too. I love it.

Sorry this review requires going off on a tangent, but I feel I have a theory to prove. Also this is long and rambling.

I enjoyed the first Avadon well enough. But that's because it was a fresh IP. Spiderweb's last totally new IP was Geneforge. I loved the first game, despite its flaws, and hoped the sequel would be even better. Well, the sequel added a few new monsters to shape, but didn't do anything significant with the rest of it. He (Jeff Vogel) doesn't improve his games as he makes sequels. This is definitely true of Avadon. He added a new class without touching the others.

So that sounds like purely a dig at Spiderweb's ability to make sequels. Other games get away with worse, sure (Dynasty Warriors, any sports game). So how about just talking about this game? Well, other reviews here are talking about some "80 hours" of gameplay. Many RPG's achieve higher numbers like these with things like down time (managing items, houses, crafting, etc.) and repawns/random encounters. Here he does it with backtracking and reading. And this is the kind of backtracking that involves checking EVERY NPC who gives quests just to see if new ones pop up. And reading is fine, obviously, and even having reading that covers narration instead of just dialogue is good, too. But I feel it's too much. He uses it in place of visuals to too high of a degree. I once read a description of an NPC I was talking to that described her as an old woman in rags. The NPC looked like a male blacksmith to me. This complaint sounds a little odd when talking about an RPG, but video games are a visual medium. And there is clearly room for some visuals in this game engine, like having the NPC's walk around or having things look more like their description so they don't ALWAYS have to be described. Simple things! Anything! More!

On that note, the writing has gotten weird. It has this cynical tone to it. And not a "this is a gritty place where every one tries to screw you" tone, but a "I'm tired of making video games" tone.

The combat has a delightful number of scripted encounters (interesting boss fights and not-necessarily-a-boss fights), but the difficulty of combat overall is wonky. I pushed up the difficulty a notch from "normal" because I remembered the first Avadon feeling easy. This did... something. Who knows. Most of the time is spent auto-attacking trash. Until you get areas with enemies that are inexplicably way stronger because they are color-swapped. The tanking abilities do nothing, so I use the terrain to trick them into fighting the tank. Sometimes this can't be done fully and my teammates would get manhandled. Then I would just chip them away slowly on my lonely tank. There's no telling what level things are, so my tank can go from being unstoppable to burning through health pots between areas. Much of this is also due to tanking being reliant on avoidance rather than mitigation. So sometimes he dodges everything, sometimes he'd dodge nothing. I suspect using a shaman and tinkermage and filling the screen with summons is a better plan. But I made myself a blademaster, so bleh.

After 40 hours I was just too bored to continue, so that's when I had to give up and stop forcing myself to play.

P.S. Why is there housing in a game where you have a home? Avadon. Avadon is your home. And it's better than the houses you can buy by a million percent.

So I haven't played Spiderweb's games since the excellent Exile: 2 for Mac, with great spiders and an "alien" race that I still remember to this day, but I decided to give this a try. It looked great on the mac (I loved the old "flat" graphics, best rpg at that time, especially the mac version with its prettier interface and music), but besides trying out the demos a little, I've never completed another of his games until now.

I feel compelled to write my first review on Steam. I had a lot of fun playing this game!

This game has a great beginning and hooks you in right from the start. I had lots of fun and finished the game very satisfied! Great job! I think anyone deciding to jump in should just start with Avadon 2, and skip Avadon 1, it is that good. Others have mentioned the one spot in the game (with the wind teleporting) that was a little too difficult so I had to buff up a little first, but overall I've not played another RPG like this in 10 years that i've enjoyed so much!

Great game, but then I have enjoyed all of Siderwebs games.

Bought it yesterday. Its awesome! Last time I got such a deep storytelling was Baldurs Gate/Planscape Torment

Good oldschool rpg that has much more to offer then you'd expect. The story is well written, funny at times and has nice twists.
It has a good upgrading system, varied maps, tons of weapons, crafting, magic, looting etc.

The only thing that is missing is nice background music that fills the gap of having no voice acting or a narator in the game and to hide the basic environment sound loops (it's all text).

If you like oldschool rpg's then this game should be in your library.

Basically, if you enjoyed the first Avadon you will enjoy the second game in the series. The story picks up after the events of the first game (but sadly doesn't let you import your character) and everything gameplay-wise is roughly the same. Meaning you still do business as a Hand of Avadon with different partymembers from the Pactlands and explore vast Lyaneus as well as the otherwordly nightmare region called the Corruption. The latter is the secret star of the game, while everything else was kinda samey compared to the first title - the Corruption is something new, it had an excellent (while not exactly original) storyline and a vastly different tileset. Particularly the descriptions of the place got me, very well written.

The battles and iventory-management are the same as before, the biggest innovation is the new class called Tinkermage which is somewhat like a fantasy-version of a Rigger from Shadowrun. The rest is the same turnbased combat from before, however I would say that the difficulty is generally higher than the first game. I had a lot more troubles with some battles than I remember having during the entirety of the original Avadon. At times the battles are just too much in the sense of them getting annoying due to taking forever (especially when just fighting "trash mobs") or forcing you to tackle them in very specific ways. Bossfights are a bit of a hit and miss too, there are a lot of gimmicky battles in this where certain conditions have to be met in order to even damage a boss. This can lead to some frustration depending on your equipment and picked class (I was somewhat disappointed by the performance of my Blademaster duo). There is a lot more combat in this, which I sadly don't care that much for because I enjoy Avadon a lot more for storyline, nicely written characters and the lovely descriptions of people and places (which Avadon 2 still delivers in spades).

It's a very solid title all things considered, recommended for those who enjoy a nice Pen & Paper-like campaign (with the added little remarks and snark in the dialogue this time around it feels even more P&P like than the original) but can put up with some tedium in the gameplay-department. Certainly a bit of an aquired taste and not for everyone.

Tiny bad graphics, simple sound effects and a Gold Box-esque turn based interface.

(If you don't know what the AD&D gold box games by SSI are (ex Dark Queen of Krynn, Curse of the Azure Bonds), you're a wet behind the ears gamer who probably sneers at anything not bump-mapped. And if you dont know what SSI was, you missed one of the best eras in CRPGs. If you live in a country where these games were not released, forgive me. Then go get them somewhere on the internet.)

Its Spiderweb. If youve played one of developer Jeff Vogel's games, visually/interface/sound wise you've played em all. You know what to expect and it isn't much.

But you weren't playing this game to be wowed by the graphics and sound, were you?

If you were, go somewhere else so you don't clutter the forum with your complaints. Id rather not hear it.

But if you like immersive, in depth plots where you actually have to read and imagine what your character sees, and you like gewtting swept away be an amazing world and story,

then go for it, you wont regret it.