Avaris 2: The Return of the Empress

My honest reaction after sitting with Avaris 2 is that it sells you the spectacle of scale and delivers almost none of the management depth that should come with it. The pitch is genuinely interesting on paper: a progressive territory-recovery campaign where your force grows battle by battle, eventually pushing tens of thousands of units onto a single battlefield. As someone who spends real time thinking about decision trees and resource loops, I wanted that to mean something mechanically. It mostly doesn't. The controls are about as lean as they get. Left-click moves the Empress, right-click puts troops into formation, spacebar fires her special attack, and shift accelerates the game speed. That is essentially the full input vocabulary. The special attack has a fixed firing radius that cannot be adjusted, which means repositioning the Empress constantly to avoid friendly-fire is the closest thing to tactical tension the game offers. The movement itself is restricted to eight directions and feels clunky by any modern standard. For a genre that lives or dies on moment-to-moment decision-making, those constraints matter a lot. The between-battle layer tries to inject some RPG texture. The Empress gains experience and can upgrade her sword, shield, and magical ring via a market you can refresh with F2. Regular soldiers can be converted, at a gold cost, into one of three specialist classes: ninjas for speed and shuriken throws, mages for ranged magic, or undead units. Gold is scarce early but loosens up over time. The problem is that this progression plateaus hard. Once you have acquired the stronger equipment and converted a meaningful portion of your army, nothing in the market or upgrade system changes the dynamic in a meaningful way. The build variety that should keep a second or third run interesting simply is not there. An ally force from the Kingdom of Orsas fights alongside you but operates on its own AI logic and cannot be directed, which removes another lever of strategic control. The presentation is functional at best. Graphics sit at a basic indie level with some stock visual effects that reviewers have noted look pulled from off-the-shelf game-engine asset libraries. Audio is similarly thin, with kill sounds that repeat without variation for the entire game. There is no mod ecosystem, no offline play option despite being single-player only, and no sign of post-launch content updates that addressed the feedback the game received on release. The Steam review split sits near the dead center of mixed, which about captures it: the spectacle of watching large unit counts collide has a novelty window, but novelty is all it is. The in-game help system is clearly written and movement indicators are readable, so at least orientation is not a problem. If you have a very specific itch for watching massive simulated battles play out and want a light, low-commitment session format, there is a narrow audience here. For anyone expecting the battlefield management label to mean genuine tactical agency, layered unit synergies, or meaningful late-game decisions, this will feel underbaked. The depth just is not present, and no amount of unit-count spectacle makes up for a decision space that exhausts itself inside a single campaign. Diego, Scout Team

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