A game that could have been better, but a large amount of bugs and instances of stale gameplay bring it down.

User Rating: 5.5 | AVENCAST: Rise of the Mage PC
As interesting as the game looked from the gamespot review, even just starting it up I had issues with the game. It seems that every time I start Avencast it tries to auto-adjust my monitors resolution, which wouldn't
be such a bad thing if the game could manage to get it right. It sets it
to a resolution just enough above my monitors optimal, that the entire
screen ends up shifted to the right about two inches. And since it checks
and readjusts every time the game starts, I ended up manually setting the resolution every time I started the game.

Although some of the bugs have been fixed by the 1.02 patch, quite a few still remain, some will even prevent you from finishing quests, thus stopping your progress in the game. But on a good note, contrary to what gamespot and other reviewers might say, I never really had any issues with the interface or the camera.

The gameplay itself is unfortunately also somewhat of a letdown, melee combat is almost entirely out of the question. Since most of the mobs in the
game will gank you quite fast once you get close enough. Which really makes the majority of the blood magic spells/skills useless, oh boy, one of the games spell trees shot out of the sky already, great.

Not to mention that most boss fights result in you summoning a minion
and sitting back and firing weak little staff shots at the boss for twenty minutes until it dies. One good thing though, is alot of the puzzles in the game are quite fun and a breath of fresh air from randomly killing mobs. Unfortunately the puzzles almost entirely disappear later in the game.

Graphically the game isn't all that bad, alot of the spell effects look quite nice, and some of the armor you can get is also rather good looking. The game environment itself is average to slightly underdeveloped but it doesn't show that badly.

All and all, the games decent graphics and spell effects, and enjoyable puzzles can't save the game from being the buggy and boring mess that it is.