Despite Bethesda's incredible popularity, very few game studios attempt to replicate their Scrolls-like formula, perhaps due to the sheer amount of effort and time that goes into making a halfway decent open world. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon takes on this challenge by taking the core concept of Skyrim and Oblivion, adds a dash of Soulslike mechanics like bonfires and attribute upgrades, and wraps it all up in a sprinkling of quality-of-life features to create an irresistible package for any open-world action-RPG fan.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon Review
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon delivers a bleak, immersive RPG experience, though its clunky combat and unbalanced gear system hold it back.
The core feature that allows Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon to stand out, however, is that it's not content to simply copy what other games in the genre did but builds on top of it, exceeding its influences in some ways. Here are some ways it exceeds Skyrim, the most successful of Bethesda's titles.
6 Dialogue and Voice Acting
Different Voice Actors for Every Role
Unlike Skyrim's method of re-using the same voice actor for a hundred different NPCs with the same dialogue but with different faces, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon's NPCs feel like real people, with immersive dialogue that allows players to sink into the dark fantasy storyline in a way that Skyrim simply doesn't manage.
Best of all, Tainted Grail's dialogue isn't afraid to tackle adult themes and non-PG topics head-on. Coupled with the excellent voice acting, this ends up being one of the strongest points in the game's favor and something it does miles better than Skyrim.
5 Boss Fights
Cinematics, Mechanics, and Special Loot
In Skyrim, Dragons were the closest thing players had to bosses, other than one-offs like Miraak and edge cases like Dragon Priests. In Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, bosses are frequent occurrences dotted across the map. They come with unique loot exclusive to them, different movesets, and in some cases, even cinematics.
Tainted Grail takes its cue from Dark Souls more than Skyrim in this regard. However, in order to make the concept work with the Scrolls-like formula, there are no special zones or walled-off battle arenas that only bosses can enter.
4 Weapon Loadouts
Four Weapon Configurations To Swap Between Freely
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon gives the player the option to assign four sets of weapon configurations at any point and the ability to swap between them mid-combat with a simple hotkey. As a result, switching between weapons and playstyles feels intuitive and fun.
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When traversing a vast, open world, these titles make sure that the weapons you wield are not only effective, but beautiful to look at.
Build variety increases because builds that require seemingly incompatible weapons to function can work. For example, two-handed weapons and magic don't go well together because if a player has a two-handed weapon equipped, they cannot wield magic at the same time. But with weapon swapping made easy, this is no longer the case.
3 Potion Usage is More Intuitive
Downing Health Pots in Fights Feels Less Like Cheating
One of Skyrim's mechanics that is often the butt of a lot of jokes is how potions work. Players can pause the game in the middle of an intense fight, go to their health potions, drink as many as they like, and go back out to fight, trivializing the combat difficulty entirely.
Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon doesn't replace this feature; players can still go into their inventory and chug potions, but unlike Skyrim, this isn't the only way to drink potions. Tainted Grail provides two quick slots, similar to how the Item Pouch in Elden Ring works, where potions and other consumables can be assigned. As a result, players can use their potions mid-fight with a single press of a hotkey, which feels much better than Skyrim's implementation.
2 Combat Feels Better
Dodge and Parry Go a Long Way to Modernize Combat
One of the biggest improvements Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon makes over Skyrim is in combat. Swinging a weapon in this game feels like there's a weight to it. Hitting an enemy doesn't feel like slicing through air, but like the player actually hit something. Even spell impacts make their presence felt, something that is sorely missing from Skyrim. Attacks have a follow-through, meaning once a player commits to a swing, they cannot change their mind mid-way and dance away.
Most importantly, players can actually dodge and parry. Dodging comes in the form of a fast dash, which becomes more effective the less equipment weight a character has, and parrying is tied to the weapon type being used. The ability to do both of these actions makes combat, especially in melee range, a lot more dynamic than it is in Skyrim.
1 Hover Loot Display
Mousing Over a Container Shows All Items Inside
Both Skyrim and Tainted Grail are cut from the same cloth in that they both have an absolutely monstrous amount of chests, sacks, cupboards, crates, and other types of containers scattered across the world map. There is a new chest every three steps in Skyrim; Tainted Grail isn't any different.
Where the two games do differ, however, is in how the actual looting process works. In Skyrim, players have to press a hotkey to open the container and see what's inside. Doing this once or twice isn't too much of a hassle, but when looting multiple small containers, which may or may not contain anything, like urns in dungeons, it gets very tedious very quickly. In Tainted Grail, simply hovering over any container or dead body reveals everything inside, fixing this issue completely. In fact, one of the most popular Skyrim mods for PC (Quick Loot SE) does this exact thing, showing how much players prefer this method.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 77 /100 Critics Rec: 71%
- Released
- May 23, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Language, Use of Drugs
- Developer(s)
- Questline
- Publisher(s)
- Awaken Realms
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Action, RPG, Open-World, Survival Horror
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
