"Good Premise, but fatal flaw"

Siege of Avalon is probably one of the more interesting RPGs I have played. Very similar in playing style to Diablo, but a great deal less dark, and more desperate. The premise is this; You're part of a country fighting a war of survival, against a race of half-men who have declared a holy war against your people. This game is fun, but suffers a fatal flaw, which is why I'm going to rate Gameplay last.

Story: 9/10
It's cliche'd but well carried out, involving, and entertaining, complete with a few eccentric and interesting characters and fortunately very little of anything particularly cloying.

Graphics: 9/10
The graphics are quite solid, approximately on par with the first Diablo, with no real noticeable glitches. Also, the wide variety of clothing you can equip on your character keeps things interesting. Sometimes it's fun just to play Dress Up.

Sound: 7/10
Adequate. There is very little else to say about the sound here.

Gameplay: 3/10
Here is where the game's fatal flaw rears its ugly head; Siege of Avalon suffers from poor coding. While you can build up all your stats, make your character Uber strong, he has nothing to protect him from magic, and no natural resistance against it, no matter how formidable his magic skills might be, so spells cause massive damage against your character, and those same spells, cast by your character, even when fully beefed up, don't even make your enemies wince. I've actually taken a hex editor and put all the stats to their maximums, and yet the character still loses more than half his hit points to any spell cast on him, and on chapter 5, just about every spell that hits you will kill you in a single hit, unless you're very lucky, in which case the second spell will kill you. It is because of this fatal flaw that I gave up on the game and was never able to finish it.
There are also numerous AI flaws and a good chance that your save file will be corrupted(it happened to me quite often, so I usually had 4 different saves at the same point, just to keep from having to start over. Again). Again, much of this is due to poor coding.

Play time/Replayability: ?/10
I really don't know what to say here, because I've never finished the game, and gave it up out of frustration.

Buy/Rent: Neither.

It's a good game, but you'll never be able to finish it, and since it's a PC game, you cannot rent it either.. If you're willing to spend the money, go ahead and buy it, but I recommend finding some other game to spend money on, due to the fact that you can't survive even the weakest spells in this game.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/01/05