One of the worst things is when you see potential and promise in something, but it doesn’t reach the heights you know it can. That is probably the best way to describe my experience with Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon, the dark fantasy open world RPG which uses the King Arthur legend as the basis for the setting and story.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon begins strongly. You are a no-name character who is suffering from disease and is locked up on Asylum Island. You are freed by a mysterious character, but they do not help guide you to freedom, instead leaving you to figure out the path through the dangers for yourself.
It is only as you are broken out that you actually create your character, answering questions about what you were doing prior to ending up in the cell. Answering these questions feeds into which attributes get a boost at the beginning, and the playstyle you are considering. At the start you are weak, and Tainted Grail does an excellent job of showing just how that works as different enemy types cross your path and you are almost helpless to beat them, requiring quick thinking or running away.
Once you are away from Asylum Island and the first proper area, Horns of the South, things really do open up. There is the main quest to follow, which involves recovering some of King Arthur’s relics to restore his soul. Arthur’s soul just so happens to be in your body as a passenger and allows you to access various powers and abilities. You can also talk to him at bonfires and get his story, which comes in fragments since his memory is tied to the artifacts.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon has a lot of side quests and content within the world too. Many of the quests are pretty well put together and a few have some interesting and fun ways to resolve them, provided you meet the skill checks. You can tell the team have put the effort in to write some entertaining characters too, and the acting is decent too though not quite top tier.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon gives you some decent combat options. You can choose to use a sword and shield, dual wield weapons or spells, and combine them so you have a melee weapon in one hand and magic spells in the other. You can also put a few different combinations together so you can switch between quickly. For my playthrough I regularly used spell and sword, with two different combos. One allowed me to summon creatures while dealing heavy damage, while another featured a sword that had life steal and a spell that also stole health from enemies, which can be unstoppable at times.
The efficiency of your spells, weapons, armour are all linked to your attributes. As you level up you will get points to upgrade your attributes, be it physical, perception, spirituality, dexterity, and more, providing a baseline of stats to go alongside skills that you unlock in relation to these categories. Early on you can experiment, but as time goes on you should start focusing on a playstyle to really take full advantage. However, if you get bored of a particular style you can use an Origin potion to reset your points.
There’s something distinctly Oblivion to the visual style of Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon – the original, I mean, and not the remake. There is a good amount of things to discover within the world to discover, such as with dungeons that are hidden in plain sight. The Horns of the South is full of ruins showing how it has been ignored by Kamelot, while the second area of Cunacht has the show of somewhere falling apart as Kamelot tries to move everyone while locals want to stay. However, there is a clear quality divide between these regions, where Horns of the South just feels far more detailed in comparison to Cunacht. It gives a sense that Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon is quite front loaded.
Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon’s technical issues cannot be ignored, despite the regular patches that are being released. The game crashes multiple times, which can be triggered by moving from one place to another, or for some non-obvious reason. There is flickering in the environment that is distracting. There is also a bit of a weird issue when swimming where even if it looks like you are underwater, the oxygen bar doesn’t appear. On occasion, my summons did not engage with enemies or got stuck. Luckily, you can resummon so that is not a big deal, but you would still want it to be better.