Avernum 3 hammered at Gamer's Pulse
Avernum 3 hammered at Gamer's Pulse
Review - posted by Saint_Proverbius on Tue 11 March 2003, 11:06:39
Tags: Avernum 3Gamer's Pulse has written a review of Avernum 3, giving it a 10/50. The brunt of the thing is basically complaints about the graphics and the old school interface. Other than those complaints, it really doesn't say too much about the game at all.
The second, more significant problem with the game is the interface. Perhaps the clunkiest interface I've encountered in years, it makes the game a real chore to play at times. Movement can be controlled by the mouse, but rather than clicking a destination and then moving there, a click will move your party one step in the direction of the pointer. A slew of buttons lines the bottom of the screen, and clicking on one invariably brings up a clunky menu. For example, to cast a spell, clicking on the "mage spells" icon brings up an array of mage spells to cast?you can't hotkey any of them. While movement is a bit better with the keyboard (use the numpad so that you can move diagonally as well), everything else is equally bad. The worst is looking around, talking to NPCs, or picking up dropped items. Pressing the hotkey for one of these actions will place letters over valid targets on the main screen. To interact with a given target, press the corresponding letter. So to talk to an NPC right in front of the party, you have to press "t" to talk, and then whichever letter is over that NPCs head to actually engage them in conversation. These letters don't seem to be assigned in any sort of logical way either, sometimes the NPC directly in front of you is "a," and sometimes he's "c" and some other bozo is "a." I don't want to have to think about which button to press to talk to an NPC.
Ummm.. It's not like it doesn't label all the NPCs with the letter that corresponds to them. Even then, you can click on the one you want, if I remember correctly.
Spotted this at RPGDot
The second, more significant problem with the game is the interface. Perhaps the clunkiest interface I've encountered in years, it makes the game a real chore to play at times. Movement can be controlled by the mouse, but rather than clicking a destination and then moving there, a click will move your party one step in the direction of the pointer. A slew of buttons lines the bottom of the screen, and clicking on one invariably brings up a clunky menu. For example, to cast a spell, clicking on the "mage spells" icon brings up an array of mage spells to cast?you can't hotkey any of them. While movement is a bit better with the keyboard (use the numpad so that you can move diagonally as well), everything else is equally bad. The worst is looking around, talking to NPCs, or picking up dropped items. Pressing the hotkey for one of these actions will place letters over valid targets on the main screen. To interact with a given target, press the corresponding letter. So to talk to an NPC right in front of the party, you have to press "t" to talk, and then whichever letter is over that NPCs head to actually engage them in conversation. These letters don't seem to be assigned in any sort of logical way either, sometimes the NPC directly in front of you is "a," and sometimes he's "c" and some other bozo is "a." I don't want to have to think about which button to press to talk to an NPC.
Ummm.. It's not like it doesn't label all the NPCs with the letter that corresponds to them. Even then, you can click on the one you want, if I remember correctly.
Spotted this at RPGDot
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