Where Avencast stumbles a bit is in its story and the voice acting. The localization to English is pretty rough and the voice acting lacks the level of care and polish you'd expect from a decent role-playing game. These kinds of things happen when a game is decidedly European (clockworks is out of Austria) but still the voice acting is pretty irritating. The best you can do is either grin and bear it or simply turn the sound down and read the text.

Like the voice acting, the environments are only slightly average, with lots of grays and browns populating a good portion of the game. This is alleviated somewhat by some decent lighting, excellent spell animations and a cast of monsters that are visually stimulating and well crafted.

One other area where Avencast stumbles a bit is in its interface. It's the little things that can hurt a game, like having to click multiple times to close a window that should close on its own or having to use WASD when the game should be navigated via mouse. Still part of the game's charm is that it does feel like an old school dungeon hack, so most hardcore RG players won't mind. One other problem that happened even after the latest patch was applied to the game was AI-controlled NPC's getting stuck on objects. This happened in a couple of side-quests and in a boss battle. Luckily frequent saving is the best solution for these problems, provided you've done so before these brain-dead NPC's get themselves between a wall and a chair or some other simple objects.

At the end of the day Avencast is a solid action role-playing game with some great puzzles and a combat system that tries to do things differently. Of course, mileage may vary - some RPG fans will not be pleased with what this game is trying to accomplish. It's not hard to recommend this game to PC RPG fans look for something to waste a 10 to 20 hours on and it's certainly a solid first effort from this Austrian development studio.