Avernum: Escape from the Pit
I am now 10 hours in. My characters are level 4 and I'm still very much in the beginning of the game. By now I'm pretty comfortable with the interface, and my previous criticism still stands: for a game (re)made in 2011, navigating the interface is surprisingly primitive. You cannot jump at all between different screens. If you open a character's inventory screen and want to view any other screen, such as the world map or your journal, you must first exit the inventory screen by either clicking a button in the lower right corner of the window or by hitting ESC. Fortunately, that's about where my major complaints for this game end. I've been playing at Normal difficulty for a bit now, after starting on Casual. Casual was way too easy. Almost zero damage taken in any combat. Normal is still on the easy side, but with just enough challenge that I may keep it there. I also mentioned earlier that I bumped the resolution down from 1920x1080 to 1600x900. I've now bumped it down even more to 1366x768. It just looks better IMO (other than the non-native resolution blur). Size-wise, the characters and world fit the screen perfectly at this resolution on my 23" monitor.
I'm really loving the way combat was designed in this game. Turn-based, grid-based. I love that you can switch between melee and ranged attacks anytime, without penalty (you still can't use a ranged attack on an adjacent enemy, which I agree with). I love that any character can use just about any weapon. Weapons are skills based, so you can have your mage use a bow or sword, they'll just be bad at it (unless you spend your level-up points on them instead of magic). This really opens up combat options. If you're out of spell points (or just don't want to waste them), but don't want to pass on your mage/priest's turn, they can still give melee or missile attacks a shot. Buffing spells are well-implemented and really add to the turn-based strategy. I've read that this game does not lend itself well to characters who specialize in the bow, but so far I have been quite happy with my Archer. I don't consider him to be unfairly under-powered, as the criticism claims. Maybe as the game progresses and my characters become more powerful, that criticism will become more valid?
The quests are very well laid out and easy to follow. None of this reading between the lines or having no idea where to go. As soon as you get a quest, it shows up on your world map, so you know exactly where you need to go to work on it.
One other thing I like about this game is certain skills are shared between your party. So if a lock requires your TOOL USE skill to be 5, and your four characters have TOOL USE skills of 2, 1, 1, and 1, then your party can pick that lock. The basic premise is your party communicates and combines their knowledge to help each other out. I really like that concept. Plus, it allows you more flexibility when leveling up. You don't have to focus one character on lock-picking at the expense of other skills.
Speaking of leveling up, this is also well done, if a bit "lite". I do enjoy a longer process of deciding which points to add to stats, skills and traits. Avernum really streamlines it. Each character adds 1 point to a stat, 2 points to skills, and every even level (2, 4, 6, etc), a point to a trait. It only takes a few minutes to level up your four party members.
I can definitely see myself playing more Spiderweb Software RPGs down the road...