Avencast: Rise of the Mage

I'm saying yes because I think it's a bit funny, but it's more of a maybe, meh, middle of the road thing. Avencast is a strange beast, it's an Action RPG but it doesn't really play like any other normal kind. It's not a Diablo, it doesn't play like a character action game, or a Zelda game, it's more like a kind of twin stick shooter except it also has melee and micro-dodging. It's this unique brand of janky ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that makes it compelling because it's trying something most people are aware of in a very unique way. There's a lot of spells with completely different looks, there's a fair amount of effects, but it's also still surprisingly simple at the same time. It's baffling. You get a melee thwack attack, a tiny peashooter ranged spell button, and 8 or so spell slots. The spell slots can be assigned to shortcut keys (which is F1-8 for some reason) but also by doing button combinations like Mortal Kombat. This sounds interesting were it not for the fact it's pointless. Just do the shortcut, assigned the keys to 1-8 like a normal person, and it's easy. I got through the game on normal using ranged because I remember melee being horrendous, and at the end of the game I have no clue how the hell you could get through it as melee without just spamming potions like your life depended on it. Even then most ranged spells were surprisingly useless, often using too much mana with not enough damage to compensate. Maybe it's a build thing too, but the game really only worked for me once I started spamming ice spells that froze enemies. Were it not for that spell, I think this game would've been impossible to me. Everything surrounding Avencast is surprisingly mundane. It's magic, it's wizard-y, you could say there's some kind of Harry Potter influence but it kind of veers closer to stuff like Discworld or maybe World of Warcraft at the end. They completely lose the plot on the whole wizard school thing and it just becomes dungeons and dungeons after dungeon. But that was surprisingly engaging? There's a lot of puzzles in the game, and I think that was a good move even when the puzzles were just simple logic stuff. It's better than absolutely nothing. Some puzzles even want you to read. The graphics and music get the job done, nothing special. The dialogue and voice acting is... it's clearly translated but I think the actors try enough at the right times. And those that aren't trying or are amateur sort of just add to this atmosphere of a developer's first go at a video game. If you want a wizard action RPG that's janky but still a bit fun you could do a lot worse.