Wittyreviews: Avencast: Rise of the Mage

"That blood mage will mess you up good boi!"

Many of you may not know this but I used to be an avid player of World of Warcraft, why I did I give up? Because I got bored out of my skull that's why, all I wanted was a mount and by the time I got close to the correct level I was sick of seeing the same freakin' forest constantly. So I gave up on MMO's and went back to me war games. That is untill this game came my way, Avencast: Rise of the Mage is much like WoW and then not at all at the same time.

The gameplay is what you would expect, you move around using the traditional WSAD thing. But there are two aspects that get on my nerves while I see what they were trying to do, the camera is a pain in the backside and combat is rather clunky. The camera is controlled but holding down the ctrl key and moving the mouse around, but you can only have it just above you, or directly above you, or vice versa infront. That's a real problem, I'd be walking down a corridor in a dungeon with the camera behind me as best I can and then BAM an Imp comes up behind and whacks me.

The combat is rather frustrating too, it's a bit like a rail shooter, it has a riticule that is controled by your mouse as you walk around and click the right mouse button to fire a magic missle (MAGIC MISHLE) at the enemy, but hit detection is ass sometimes too. I swear, I have the riticule firmly over a stationary enemy and the missle goes RIGHT past them. You would not believe how annoying that gets, especialy at a boss. Thankfully though, that is taken care of when you realise you can have these epic spells to help. You get them by spending you level up points and they're cast by doing combo's like "up, left" or "left, right" or if you can't do that, the first 3 have short cuts like F1. You even have mellee combat, you can whack the enemy with your staff which is supprisingly effective. Which brings me to another aspect of the game, you have 2 basic classes you can use. Blood Mage and Spirit Mage. Blood Mages use mellee as their main weapon and all of the spells do things like fire strike and freezing the enemy in place. Spirit Mages use the more traditional spells, with their own twist. Like a wave that damages enemies to blasting enemies back. You can also summon creatures to help but you won't be doing that for a while.

The voice acting is so cheesy it's actualy funny. Nothing like hearing voices that don't go with the character at all right? The graphics are what you would expect for the time, a little pixely but the camera is at just enough of an angle that you can't quite tell...was that deliberate with the camera control then? But anyway, for all of my complaints the game is actualy really fun. The camera and combat is just frustrating enough that it makes you not want to just give up. The cutscene animation is nice, the combat is fluid even if I did say it's clunky, and the best bit is that the other spells you can cast look FREAKIN' AWESOME. One of them reminds me of Nanoha's devine buster. All in all, a fun game that's worth a go at the very least.

Final Score: 3/5

Give it a try, wuss.

By Wittyreviewer