Ah, now this is a proper successor to Avernum. Good enough that I’d suggest completely skipping the first two Avadons to avoid the issue of retcons, if nothing else.
No wild swings in difficulty, smooth leveling progression, Fatigue now regenerates automatically (so no more battles consisting of 90% basic attacks), a sensible selection of skills without any bizarre cross-tree requirements, a varied assortment of companions with relatively frequent commentary, quite a number of choices to be made, far better integrated (non-PC) Tinkermage content, and no main quest related backtracking. The only real negatives are a couple of bugs (e.g. Healing Turret won’t work if it’s the first one you place), the game once again being blind to playing as a Tinkermage, and the persistent oddity of everyone acting like the other Hands in your party are just random mercenaries.
If you liked Avernum or anything about the earlier Avadon games then definitely pick this up, and if you haven’t played any Spiderweb Software games before then consider giving this one a chance (so long as you like turn-based RPGs).
“Ah, now this is a proper successor to Avernum. Good enough…”
For some reason the above Avernum link took me to a WordPress login page, instead of the relevant Various Thoughts commentary.
Now, after having logged-in, I get directed to a “WordPress > Error” page which says, “Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page.”.