Avencast: Rise of the Mage
Play Avencast, the epic roguelike action-RPG with tons of combat moves, spells, and equipment. Fight against evil forces to save your academy and vanquish the darkness. As you progress, learn powerful spells and combos to increase your chances of victory.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is a action roguelike, hack and slash and dungeon crawler game
developed by ClockStone
and published by .
Released on March 17th 2010 is available only on Windows
in 2 languages: English and German.
It has received 697 reviews of which 486 were positive and 211 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.7 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 2.49€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.
The Steam community has classified Avencast: Rise of the Mage into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP/Vista/7
- Processor: 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium or 2200+ AMD Athlon processor
- Memory: 512 MB (1GB Vista)
- Hard Drive: 4.4 GB of free space
- Graphics: GeForce FX 5700 or better / ATI Radeon 9700 or better
- Sound: DirectSound compatible
- DirectX®: 9.0c
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Can be brutal at times, and a bit samey in places but good fun all round. A 70/100 effort. The good Patched to work on modern OSes and computers Spells are good Lots of weapon, spell and clothing/armour upgrades Story is pretty good too Action comes thick and fast Puzzles are clever The bad Some backtracking involved Fighting the same mobs gets old, especially toward end game Side quests are ho-hum
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Avencast: Rise of the Mage is an ARPG from 2007 that feels and looks quite old-school. The game comes from a small dev team without much experience, but it's full of creative touches. While not perfect, it's better than many people realize. It uses WASD controls instead of the typical point-and-click style, with a top-down view and various movement and camera settings that take time to get used to. I initially experienced crashes after the intro, but setting anisotropic filtering to linear fixed the issue. Some players recommend disabling cutscenes, though I didn’t want to miss the story. You play as a young mage apprentice sent to the Academy of Avencast to complete your studies in magic. The story is fairly cliché but interesting enough to keep you engaged. The voice acting is decent, though the quality of the dialogue is mixed. Some lines work, while others feel a bit clunky. The story is also told through charming storybook cutscenes, which adds a nice touch. The game features two main schools of magic: blood magic, which is melee-focused, and soul magic, which focuses on ranged attacks. The summoning school is split between blood and soul magic, so it doesn’t really count as its own school. Casting spells is done either through hotkeys (F1–F4) or by using a unique system of movement combinations and mouse clicks. While there’s a wide variety of spells, the more powerful combat spells often fall short, as enemies can easily dodge them. These spells also take too long to cast and consume too much mana, making them impractical/worthless for most combat situations. In contrast, AoE spells are much more reliable due to their lower mana costs and ability to hit multiple targets. Skill points, earned by defeating enemies or completing quests, allow you to learn new spells or improve your attributes. Combat is hit-or-miss. Movement feels slow and cumbersome, and mastering the dodge roll takes time. Entering rooms can be frustrating, as you often have to step in far enough for the walls and ceiling to disappear, making enemies hard to see at first. The environments feel repetitive, with a muted color palette and little variety. Every area, especially the academy, feels too large and looks almost identical, making exploration tedious after a while. Despite these issues, the game surprises with its quests. They’re not all typical fetch quests—there is a refreshing variety, including some with unique gameplay elements, which keeps things interesting. The puzzles throughout the game also add an unexpected layer of challenge, which helps break up the combat-heavy sections. That said, the boss fights are tedious, and enemies later in the game become bullet sponges. The final levels are packed with traps, making combat overwhelming at times, as you juggle dodging tough enemies and avoiding magic trap attacks. I also wish the later levels had more open areas—navigating tight corridors with a camera that frequently gets stuck on walls is frustrating.
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This game was so peak. And i may just be biased since i was very addicted to it for around decade ago with a physical copy of the game that was lost. To this day i can never forget the seminar rooms ost... It's still probably is my favourite spellcasting game even though there aren't that large variety of spells except upgrading them to a better one... And spin to win cyclone is still the best way to play the game, or soul meteor if you're going for soul magic route... or just go both if you could accept enemy hp sponges for a little more fun. Cleared the game on hard and i cant remember how much times i got one shotted from wolgaths and floor traps... especially floor traps but the difficulty is on point and you just have to use summoning as bait and spam magic shield and rolls to win the hard fights. The only thing that bothered me to this day is gear rarity and modifiers felt kind of underwhelming, it definitely has the arpg formula like titan quest but man, some normal gears can be better than epic gears, and the one with better mods are cheaper than the weaker one... and how does mana regen mod is rarer than blood/soul magic mods? I think the story is also good, i won't go much further into details but the high fantasy atmosphere of this world is a breath of fresh air and felt neither generic or overrated, atleast in my opinion. You get the lore of the academy of Avencast and some of the background of other realms especially your character's birthplace and that's all i care, i don't want another 30 volumes of lores brainstorming and shoving into my face. Let those be for a prequel or spin-off that i wished to happen one day snorts copium. There are actually quite few bugs that i encountered this time around which i swear i did not had any bugs from the previous times i played this game for many times. Most common is script popup bugs but its not game breaking, and the second is visual bug where anything else except the floor turned black, but it only happened once in the museum area and it was permanently gone a few seconds after. The first time i tried to run the game i had DX9 error which only happened once and was never seen again. I could just assume these issues probably had to do with compability with modern hardware or os or steam port but when it comes to these issues im not knowledgeable enough to provide a definite solution. I wouldn't raise the bar and call this game a masterpiece, something is definitely felt lacking with the game... but i still loved it just like i did years ago. Make a prequel already god fucking dammit!
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TLDR: Not quite a hack n slash, not quite Diablo, not quite an RPG, but you level up to get cooler spells and fight bigger baddies traveling through pretty neat looking areas. Its 5 bucks on Steam, there's no way I can say it isn't worth that and more. SAVE OFTEN though, cuz you may crash (or die) often and the auto save is seldom. (Mostly) spoiler free review. Avencast is a simple little game that offers not very much, but does what it offers well enough. The basis of the game is, you use keystrokes to cast spells (Blood Magic for Melee, or Soul Magic for ranged), and you level up to get new, cooler spells. An idea they mess with is instead of pressing a key to cast fireball, you would press a movement key, another movement key, and then right click for it. Seems kinda cool, right? And it is... to an extent. The thing about that is, you can also just... keybind like you would any other game. You can just press a key to cast fireball, and eschew all the movement gimmicks for casting spells. Which feels like it may take away from the core identity of the game and make it more mundane, but once you get into it, you'll definitely want to be able to just press a key to receive a spell. I spent my whole playthrough as a Soul Mage, using only ranged spells. I would snipe enemies that were unaware, and then have to kite them around to avoid taking damage while blasting 'em with various ranged spells. Many enemies in this game will bum-rush you, and luckily you have both a quickstep and a roll to avoid them. No stamina bar though, so you don't really ever need to pace your dodges. You just have to make few mistakes; even a hit or two could take out half your health bar. Just as many enemies in the game will sit back and shoot projectiles at you, so a crowded room quickly becomes a bullet hell, with you running between melee attackers and bolts of magic, weaving spells between dodges. Movement felt good, and collision on objects in rooms felt well made; my only complaints about mobility are that rolling requires a double-tap of a movement key, which I would sometimes do on accident, and you cant dodge or roll while your weapon is sheathed. To be perfectly honest, I only touched 1 of the 3 skill trees, Soul Magic. Progression felt pretty significant; I started with shooting tiny, pathetic wisps of magic that did measly single digits of damage, then slowly got some stronger spells with longer cast times and greater mana costs that looked more impressive. By the end I was hitting for thousands of damage with the mighty SOUL SPEAR, a spell that pierced through all enemies in a line, with a huge particle effect and a mighty thrum of audio! They do a great job making you feel like a mage who is improving his skill substantially. In addition to that, there's also the aforementioned Blood Magic, and Summoning (which has both blood and soul scaling). But I didn't actually touch any of that stuff. About a thirdway through the game they tell you, "hey, pick soul or blood" and then you get a permanent buff to that, so it feels like they slightly discourage hybridization. You can definitely tell this was a game made in mid 2000s though. They pepper in a little bit of "platforming" (mostly just dodging traps and the like), and a little bit of puzzle-solving here and there. None of these elements are really core to the game, but they all add a fresh breathe of air since they come up only seldom to give you a break from the "GO GO GO!" you experience while fighting enemies. Alot of things about this game aren't too impressive though. Many enemies you'll see over and over again, some of those enemies felt like INSANE damage sponges, and you can cheese alot of the more durable guys by just casting freeze... hitting once... casting freeze... hitting once, etc etc. The RPG elements are light-as-a-twig, the gear upgrades you get are honestly far-and-few-between. The voice acting is mid at best, the story is pretty trite and predictable (with no choices to make), the OST isn't that remarkable (one of the mid game tracks DID stand out to me though, perfect for setting the scene, and they really liked to use string tremolo, so its not like its all bad). As for bugs, I only encountered a few. I assume because I played this in 2024 and this is a 2007 game, but I did randomly crash here and there. One big crash was right before a cutscene started to play, but that seemed to be a common issue as a found a resolution to it immediately and fixed it in about a minute. Oh yeah, the base camera controls are kinda weird too, but they have an option that makes it not terrible so I just turned that on and forgot about it. All and all, I played through Avencast once, felt fully satisfied, and will gladly recommend it to anyone who wants a old-school mage game you can pick up and get into instantly. Is it great? No. Is it jank? At times, yes. But is it worth playing? Sure, at least once.
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Very nice action RPG, really feels good to delve into combat and such. Still holds up today, easily, just disable videos in the options app and you're good to go. Hope u enjoy!
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 23 November 2024 07:14 |
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| SteamSpy data | 19 December 2024 01:52 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 12:46 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 02:05 |
