Avencast: Rise of the Mage on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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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 action rpg game
developed by ClockStone
and published by .
Released on March 17th 2010 is available only on Windows
in 3 languages: English, German and French.
It has received 707 reviews of which 490 were positive and 217 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.7 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 4.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 2.04€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Avencast: Rise of the Mage into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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System 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
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
This is such a blast from the past. Every 5 years or so I randomly go back to this game and replay it. It's one of those 10/10 amongst the average titles of the past. It was close to being one of the big titles of forever. Yet like many other games at the time of great experimentation and creativity, it missed some marks and sadly fell into obscurity throughout the years. The game even has a Fame (highscore) system and I can't find a single place online where people compare their Fame. Today we live in a world of overabundance. So nothing stays in middle. Things are either the next best thing after discovering fire or they're complete forgotten. This game deserves to be remembered at least a little bit. The atmosphere, the gameplay and even the aesthetics of the graphics actually hold up in 2025. I would genuinely have fun competing with people for Fame points if SteamDB wasn't showing just me & 1 other person playing this cool little blast from the past.
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Avencast: Rise of the Mage is an action RPG from 2007 which feels pretty dated today. It comes from a small dev team that didn't have much experience, but you can tell they were passionate about it. While it's far from perfect, it's actually better than most people give it credit for. It uses WASD controls instead of the typical point-and-click style, with a top-down view and different movement and camera options that take some getting used to. I had some crashes right after the intro, but turning the anisotropic filtering to linear fixed the issue. Some players recommend disabling the cutscenes instead, but I wanted to see what the story was about. You play as a young mage apprentice heading to the Academy of Avencast to complete your magic studies. The story is pretty typical for a fantasy game, but I really liked these cute storybook-style cutscenes that tell parts of the story. The voice acting is okay; some lines work fine, while others sound a bit awkward. The game has two main types of magic: blood magic for melee-focused fighting, and soul magic for ranged attacks. There's also summoning, but it's just split between the other two schools, so it doesn't really feel like its own thing. You can cast spells either with hotkeys (F1–F4) or through this unique system where you do movement combos and mouse clicks. There are tons of different spells, but the powerful combat ones are pretty useless because enemies just dodge them easily. They also take forever to cast and consume too much mana, so you end up not using them much. The AoE spells are far more reliable since they use less mana and don't miss constantly. New spells can be unlocked with skill points you get from killing enemies and completing quests, or you can use those points to boost your attributes instead. The combat is hit or miss. Your character feels heavy and slow to control, and it takes time to figure out how the dodge roll works properly. Entering rooms is also a hassle; you need to step way inside before the walls disappear, so you're basically walking blind into potential fights. The environments get repetitive fast, and everything shares the same bland color scheme and ends up looking similar. The academy especially feels way too big with nearly identical halls, which makes exploring tedious after a while. But the game surprised me with its quests. They're not all just typical fetch or kill quests; there's actually some decent variety, and some have unique mechanics. The puzzles scattered throughout are also a nice break from all the fighting. Boss fights take forever to finish, and enemies towards the end become these bullet sponges that take ages to kill. The last sections throw traps at you constantly, which means you're battling tough monsters while also trying not to get hit by magical hazards, and it gets hectic fast. The narrow passages in the later levels don't help either; fighting in tight spaces with a camera that constantly clips into walls is just frustrating.
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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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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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Frequently Asked Questions
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is currently priced at 4.99€ on Steam.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 4.99€ on Steam.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage received 490 positive votes out of a total of 707 achieving a rating of 6.66.
😐
Avencast: Rise of the Mage was developed by ClockStone.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is not playable on MacOS.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is not playable on Linux.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is a single-player game.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage does not currently offer any DLC.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage does not support Steam Remote Play.
Avencast: Rise of the Mage is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Avencast: Rise of the Mage.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 08 July 2025 03:27 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 13 July 2025 04:41 |
| Steam price | 15 July 2025 20:45 |
| Steam reviews | 13 July 2025 20:04 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Avencast: Rise of the Mage, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Avencast: Rise of the Mage
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Avencast: Rise of the Mage concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Avencast: Rise of the Mage compatibility
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Developer
ClockStone
Release
17 Mar 2010
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