Avencast: Rise of the Mage review

Nov 29, 2007

Similar to the cold horror of waking up next to a corpse, sometimes a game reminds us all effortlessly that there are still uncreative, dull-edged developers who will gladly rip off anything to make a quick buck. Avencast, like an excrement-driven Delorian, takes us back to the heady days of Diablo, mixing in various pillaged elements from the rest of the fantasy genre, with every cliché imaginable. While Fate at least tried to be original, Avencast manages to be about as much fun as Ben Stein reading the Bible.

Unlike the genuine article, Avencast’s controls are sluggish; a strange mish-mash of FPS and Diablo controls that’s confusing at best and frustrating the rest of the time, as your character moves off in the direction of where your mouse points instead of where you actually want to go. While this carries on, you have to hastily pull together moves to bring calm to the mayhem of monsters that the game throws at your underpowered, adolescent ass.