Avernum 6

If you've played the first 5, play this one. It's the last one. So it would be weird if you gave up 5/6 of the way through the heptology.

It's just... really boring. The story is okay, the dialogue and stuff is fine, but the gameplay is godawful and it doesn't get better. This game came out eight years after Starcraft: Brood war, but it has no quality of life features. It completely lacks engaging combat. You're limited to two summons, so don't even think of having more than two casters in your party. "Difficult encounters" are just meant to be cheesed by pre-buffing before going into combat and spamming summons to take hits for you. The skill points system is godawful, and it doesn't feel like you are progressing when you level up.

Play another cRPG instead.

I'm sorry but being a player who originated from The Exile Trilogy I can't justify completing this game compared to Exile 3 Ruined World

I like turn by turn rpg games and this is exactly that. Almost old-school, the game has classes, player stats, magic, combat (ranged, melee, and magical), and a very good story. An isometric top-down view of the local geography

I love all of the games in this series. The look does exactly what it needs to do, they play very smoothly for what they are trying to accomplish, and the stories are actually pretty damn good. I've spent a good amount of time playing these games and I will time and time again. They are classics, but beyond that, they are gems. If you like isometric RPG games, this is a must.

I've heard that this one is the best of Avernum series, so decided to give it a shot. I'm not the kind of player that demands great audiovisual effects in videogame, in my youth I have enjoyed (and I still do) many older titles. Alas, this thing I cannot bear.
There is literally no music. Sound effects are scarce, cheap sounding and silly. Graphics isn't really awful, but it's difficult and tiresome to tell who is who when there are many characters on screen, or to look for an interactable objects and loot. Animations are almost nonexistent. Horrible user interface (can't even close a pop-up window with the same hotkey that opens it or via Esc, you have to use a mouse). Walls of text roughly shoved down your throat. Shallow character creation and development. Combat is all about autoattacks and couple of spells over and over again (the latter is for half of your party tops). I can't really talk about story, but gameplay-wise this game is a HARD no.

Played those games since i was small, you'll easily get 80+ hours of fun out of them! Just think of it as a single player DnD session

So I start the game and get up to the point where the drug addict is going to attack you, and If I end the dialog and blast him first, while he is threatening me i get Plot killed for "starting a life of crime" what the hell? there's barely any difference in circumstance, and nobody is around to question or care, hell nobody knew I killed the dude when I let him attack me first without me telling them

I have played this game before on my Ipad. This game is pretty difficult even on normal difficulty, but it is still very fun. I have played through like the first third to one-half of the game multiple times and have enjoyed it every time. The game is very fitting conclusion to the series. If you enjoy great stories and can stand dated graphics, you should definitely buy this.

A good conclusion to the series, with lots of the qol updates the remakes had so it doesn't feel as old.

Oldschool is the best school - very absorbing game with great replay value provided you choose different moral alignments for your party and role play

Quite a classic, maybe not so notoriously known as it would deserve. Quite an underdog. Yet, since I played Exile, then Avernum series, these games become one of my favs.
Unique engine, story, gameplay and totally original RPG system.
I applaud to the life-long works of Spiderweb Software.

A continuation of one of the most fascinating and creative RPGs I’ve ever experienced. The mind that made this game is awesome. If you enjoy a wonderful story that you get to be the centerpiece of this is the game for you.

Many more hours of game play than the other "Avernum" titles so far.
Challenging bosses and combat situations, tons of loot/spells, and (a few) outcome options along the way.

Intriguing story line which brings the nature of Avernum and all the involved powers (Human nations, Nephil, Slith, Spiral Pit, Vahnatai, Dragons, etc.) to a "conclusionist" scenario based on how the previous games have handled them thus far. It is similar in this regard with, and probably as qualified as, Avernum 3.

Personally, I wish there were more graphic options for characters. Sometimes the bosses can be a little too challenging without looking up walks-through. It is not possible to kill a dragon. But those are all the petty negative things I have to say.

Recommend if you like isometric, loot-heavy, dungeon grinds and power politics. There's a book's worth of reading. The setting is unique. Great game.

I remember playing Avernum as a kid and have fond memories of it, now it appears that very little has changed.

If you want a nostaligia trip this is definately a game for you, however it's grindy as hell and hasn't aged all that well compared to other games of the genre.
The fact that not much has changed isn't exactly a bad thing, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

The only problem I have is how clunky the UI is, in the fact that you could carve it onto a stone and it would still be intuative. It works, it's just not very nice to look at for longer than half an hour at a time. Still enjoy it though.

6/10

Summary: This is pretty fun BUT it's basically a beta for the Avernum 1-2-3 remakes, and kinda falls apart in the last third.

I know its somewhat unfair to judge a game due to lacking the features and balance changes that were introduced in later sequels, but having played Escape from the Pit / Crystal Souls first, I wound up missing a lot of basic quality of life features. For instance, if you want to make an attack with a ranged weapon and you're too far away to do so, the game won't just run your character forward, but will instead tell you that you can't attack. A lot of annoying little things that alternate between that and outright balance changes:

*You basically get into combat the second you see an enemy, so you never have time to buff before a fight - you either run through the overworld with buffs constantly on, or give up on them entirely.
* Clerics get their first area of effect spell very late, and it's a fire spell that rolls around just when you're fighting mostly fire-resistant enemies.
* Fire-resistant enemies that love to block melee attacks. I never really felt my party was in danger past the early game unless I stumbled into a sidequest combat without being prepared for it, but a lot of the unavoidable maingame combat was horribly sloggy, with the enemies being way more tanky than necessary.
* The game is kinda balanced so that you get a lot of challenge out of optional sidequests on normal difficulty while unavoidable maingame content is quite a bit easier (if sloggy). Not sure if I approve of that, and the very notion of going through the sidequest combat on a higher difficulty is frightening.
* Game kinda falls apart in the end. You kill the ostensible main bad guys, and are then left retreading the same ground for a few hours, cleaning up loose ends and doing fairly unimpressive quests until you're allowed to access the endgame battle. An endgame which doesn't even have named enemies.

With all that in mind, I had a great deal of fun fighting and exploring for about two-thirds of the game, and was invested enough to slog through the remaining third, poor balance and annoying interface issues and all. Not quite the epic sendoff the series deserved, but probably worth your time nonetheless.

I bought Avernum VI on a sale. I knew what to expect but had never played any of Spiderweb’s games before. After finishing, I thoroughly recommend it, with minor reservations.

The graphics are simple but effective; actually, the sprites can be quite charming. I’ve played Dwarf Fortress and a number of rogue-likes so the graphics didn’t get in the way of my enjoyment of Avernum. The only complaint I have about them is that it was quite a challenge to target enemies and move a tile when there were many characters around you during combat, especially in cramped corridors and rooms. The UI is also a bit unfriendly.

There are a few issues with combat, imho. It works fine, but it can be very grindy towards the end of the game. I played in the normal difficulty and some of the fights dragged for too long, with enemies that were hit sponges, could hit multiple times, and could summon, all in the same round. I imagine that it must be complicated to balance the challenges in a RPG such as Avernum. I also understand that good games don’t take the player by the hand. That said, after 100 game-hours combat fatigue started to weight me down to the point that I saw myself rushing to finish and avoiding combat (or combat side-quests) whenever I could.

Where the game truly shines is in its story. Jeff Vogel (the creator of the game) is a gifted writer. He managed to present the land and its people very convincingly, sometimes in just a few strokes. Although you encounter most NPCs only briefly, their descriptions usually convey them as fleshed, three dimensional characters with a strong sense of their emotions and previous history. I suspect that some of them (and the places) are survivors from previous Avernum games and it must have been thrilling for veteran players of the series to re-encounter them again. I also enjoyed that Jeff avoided the simplistic moral narratives or Manichean accounts of “good x evil” that are quite common in fantasy RPGs.

In summary, I’d give the game 8/10 and would recommend it for anyone who likes “old school” RPGs (however you define such an open-ended term). I bought his first installment in the revamped series (Escape from the Pit) and I’m looking forward to play it in the future. Keep up the good work, Jeff!

The Avernum series is a great lineage of games by a little company. They're quite lengthy and tell a great tale of the course of several games. I started with the second one and went from there. There's a whole world to explore and the difficulty is pretty high, one wrong step into a tunnel and you'll become food for some unkown horror. There's magic, priesty heals, ranged stuff and of course good old melee combat. All the characters are very well defined and the lore is solid. Be warned though, if you don't like reading, this probably isn't for you. There's a lot of text. So that's just a matter of taste. If you don't want to play the super old ones but still want something like this without feeling left out of the story; go play Geneforge. Same company, same engine, different story. It's definatly a solid buy.

Maybe the best all around Avernum on steam (or at least until Avernum 2 and 3 show up in some form). If you've never played an Avernum it might be best to start with "Escape From the Pit," but Avernum 6 is probably a stronger game overall. Like EFTP it's very open world (although a few areas are closed off at the start), but it's biggest advantage is in its stat system, which uses the older skill based system that EFTP abandons in favor of a more simplistic skill tree model. Plus, unlike Avernums 4 and 5 (which had trouble justifying their existences plot wise), the writing is great, setting the game in a sprawling kingdom in decline and exploring some darker themes like drug addiction, famine, and terrorism.

A great end to the series.