Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon Reviews
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon has some grand ideas, and it nails a lot of what it tries, but uneven difficulty, a few poor design choices, and a Holy Grail’s worth of bugs prevent it from finding greatness.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon puts an interesting spin on Arthurian legend and presents a competent world that plays like a love letter to the open-world first-person RPG genre.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is a good game and has the potential to be an excellent game with more patches and polish.
Being divorced from the Elder Scrolls and being able to do its own thing elevates Tainted Grail. It has more personality than being a generic medieval Tolkien-esque fantasy and combines elements from real-world history and myth to realize its twisted vision.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an open-world action RPG that fans of the likes of Skyrim are likely to fall in love with. It has some technical issues and bugs that can annoy, but they're easy to overlook thanks to its enjoyable and rewarding gameplay systems as well as a genuinely interesting story with important choices to be made.
If bugs and technical clumsiness don't put you off, Tainted Grail offers more authenticity and soul than its more famous competitors.
Review in Unknown | Read full review
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon delivers a bleak, immersive RPG experience, though its clunky combat and unbalanced gear system hold it back.
It's a project where passion is on full display and I can't wait to see what Questline does next.
There are things I respect about Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. Its soundtrack, for one, is uniformly pretty good, and the game’s ambition is undeniable, but I can’t really say I enjoyed much of my time playing it, moment to moment. Occasional striking vistas and questlines can’t make up for a world that feels pretty inauthentic in its representation of a fictionalized version of Celtic culture, and the way you are forced to constantly wander it to complete straightforward missions makes it a space that is hard to enjoy exploring. And while there are interesting roleplaying narrative beats, that is rarely reflected in gameplay that railroads you into one of two playstyles.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon achieves its ambitious goal: to follow in the footsteps of Skyrim and Oblivion, with a game that looks squarely at the classics. Tremendously fun and varied, it offers complete freedom to experience all kinds of adventures in Avalon, and its epic scale is a testament to the hard work of this independent team.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Look, in the middle of all this chaos, the world does have atmosphere. Gritty, creepy, and weirdly beautiful at times, it’s just so unfortunate that the graphic fidelity is so freaking inconsistent.
Despite its lack of refinement, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is entertaining and addictive. It has a sprawling story and world to explore with dozens of hours of content. Its combat is more effective and engaging than you might expect. It’s a bit messy to be sure, but fans of classic RPGs are almost certain to enjoy Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon’s take on Arthurian mythology and old-school roleplaying games.
A welcome surprise, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon really clicked with me. The Euro indie Skyrim that could, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon might not be as technically sound as other genre efforts, but across its 60-80 hour playtime there's a lot to enjoy here, while its inventive take on Arthurian legends and surprisingly effective writing all add up to make it a compelling prospect for RPG fans everywhere that don't want to wait 89 years for the next mainline Elder Scrolls title to drop.
The developers of Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon call it a love letter to open world RPGs as if the game were just a tribute to the masterpieces of the genre such as Skyrim or Oblivion, when in fact we are dealing with a production with great personality, spectacular from an artistic point of view and with a plot entangled enough to stick us to the monitor for quite some time. The gameplay does not aim to innovate the genre, but it offers everything you could want from a modern role-playing game, reinterpreting the story of King Arthur in a dark key full of compelling combat.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Despite these technical hiccups and the sense of artificiality that creeps into the open world on a macro scale, The Fall of Avalon’s intimate moments remain resonant—and, at their most evocative, enthralling.
If you've recently been exploring the verdant expanses of Cyrodiil, in the Oblivion remaster, you might consider giving Tainted Grail: The Fall...
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is not simply „Polish Skyrim”. It’s a well crafted RPG that surprises with great atmosphere, interesting story and the developers’ ingenuity when faced with limitations of the technical or budgetary nature.
Review in Polish | Read full review
Despite major technical issues, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon is an exciting "Scrolls-like" that offers a tightly-scoped RPG experience that shows a ton of potential for the franchise and genre.
I'm always keen to dive into an RPG and open RPG's provide a satisfying level of freedom but if the story telling isn't there then interest can fade quickly. Tainted Grail: The Fall Of Avalon doesn't just hold that interest… it keeps piquing it. When you build your world upon an established legend it can be tempting to let the existing elements do all the heavy lifting… here that legend is simply the starting point and helps colour the world, but the new Lore is what really brings it to life! If you are a fan of the Arthurian legend you might well enjoy this furthering of the stories. If you enjoy open world RPG games… then definitely grab a copy!
While Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon may not shine from a technical standpoint and can feel like a patchwork of successful ideas reassembled in a new way, pulling off such a feat was far from easy. The developers never hid their (notable) sources of inspiration and have instead crafted a love letter to open-world role-playing games, brought to life through a compelling and well-executed dark fantasy atmosphere-one capable of winning over genre enthusiasts and, perhaps, drawing in newcomers as well. It took some time in early access to reach this point, but it was undoubtedly worth the wait.
Review in Italian | Read full review