A great beginning to a great series! Aveyond continues to impress with a great balance of storyline and RPG style fighting. Choose your difficulty level, transfer your characters and their inventories from one game to the next within the series, and made decisions that affect the storyline.
This is the first installment of a four part series about a girl thief and her journey through the land of Aveyond. Plot, gameplay, and visuals are well done. There is minimal repetitiveness in battles, so you don't get sick of the fighting so much as you do in some games. The storyline that can change somewhat depending on choices made throughout the game which makes it more engaging. I recommend that if you play this game and enjoy it then you should go ahead and get the entire series because you can transfer your inventory, stats, etc. from one game to the next so it's really like one huge game split into four games.
Pros: Storyline, characters, & visuals were simple but effective in creating an immersive environment and an interesting plot. The fighting system is unique in that you equip badges to give characters spells, and if you change your mind, you can equip the badge for a different character and give that character the spell instead at any point in the game which was really awesome because you get to experiment with different strategies throughout the game.
Cons: Too much "grinding" (playing the same baddies over and over ad nauseum#, not being able to avoid the baddies, glitches #quite a few but they're minor and usually won't impede game play- read some of the forums on BF for more info before you play this game!#. The most disappointing aspect of the game was that there is no journal feature to help you keep track of what you're doing and where you're going. Since I tend to play a couple of hours then pick up again a few days later, I was usually left going "Now what was I doing?!" If you have 18 hours to kill and you like to play straight through, then power to you- if I were you I'd still write down on a pad of paper what you're supposed to be doing next in the game so you don't forget because switching between two parties with separate objectives can make it difficult to keep track.
Overall, it's not a bad game but I've played so many RPGs that I know there's better games out there like the Aveyond series, the Millennium series, and Skyborn #which hopefully will be a series# that I can't say it's that great. Still, it's worth a play because the storyline is interesting.
I enjoyed the second half of the game, though overall many elements were disappointing. I encourage the creators of this game to try again.
What this game needed in order to warrant 5 stars:
Sidebar select characters rather than trying to click on them because trying to click on moving characters is really a pain.
Double the number of bosses and make them actually diabolically and deviously evil rather than cute mildly annoying and not at all evil. The only one who even came close to evil was boss #2. Maybe have them come in and sabotage you occasionally.
Increase character options, like including more older women (I only saw one) or maybe throw in some ethnic diversity maybe (there was no ethnic diversity unless you think Texans are a separate ethnic group) and definitely increase skill options (4 skills is not enough!)
Offer difficulty levels for better gameplay (easy, normal, challenging, etc.)
Much like Deadly Sin 1&2 but much much better! I was impressed by the creators' latest efforts. There were some major improvements in graphics and this story line actually made sense. I loved the difficulty adjusting features, the items that healed based on percent HP not just a number HP- so cheaper items were more useful, the variety and range of choices offered whenever players got to level up- though I did miss the feature from Deadly Sin where you could reassign skill points, I think all other improvements made up for that. My only complaint: the game was too short! There had better be a sequel- I'm looking forward to it.
I loved the characters, the story, and the art in the game. Some aspects of the game were really cool, but I won't be specific because I don't want to spoil it for the rest of you. I think the creators of the game have the potential to make a truly awesome game. I wish I could say that was this game.
Sadly, the gameplay was not very satisfying. Battles were too easy and too repetitive. It took way too long to get where you needed to go (or maybe battling ten hornets consecutively made it feel that way).
Sometimes the goal was really unclear (I didn't know where to go, what to do, who I was supposed to talk to, etc.) And when I figured it out, it wasn't like "oh, duh, you idiot", it was more like "how was I supposed to know that was what I was supposed to do?!" My brain must not be wired the same way as the game creators' brains or something.
The mini-quests and what-not were usually not rewarding or worthwhile endeavors. (i.e., I did all that for 5 coins? Wow, I feel really cheap.)
A novice rpg player might enjoy this game if it weren't so frustrating to play.
I kept waiting for the gameplay to increase in difficulty and for the storyline to speed up, but neither one of those things ever happened. I'll be fair though. Being a huge fan of Avenyond games, maybe I expected too much out of The Witch and The Warrior.