BinaryMessiah Avowed Review

I have been longing for a cozy Western RPG. I can sink into them for weeks at a time and get lost in their lore, characters, world, and story. Skyrim, Oblivion, Dragon Age, Fable. These are just a few series that have given me worlds to do this with, and these are harder to come by these days. Avowed looked promising, but after Obsidian's disappointing The Outer Worlds, I wasn't so sure about this one. It looked like it played like a more modernized Skyrim, but a brand-new world is something that's hard to get right. It was tried with Kingdoms of Amalur and failed miserably. The game world needs to feel interesting and nearly be a character in and of itself. For me, gameplay can normally come second to this because without something to be invested in, there's nothing worth playing. Avowed has a very interesting idea. You are G*odlike. You are born in Eora, the same universe set in the Pillars of Eternity series. Specifically, you are in The Living Lands. You assume the role of an Aedyran Envoy for the empire to trek across the land and negotiate ways to have them join the empire. You also need to find a way to stop the Dreamscourge. This is a disease that is turning people into mindless "zombies," for lack of a better term. You end up gathering four party members along the way while running around four large maps full of side quests, hidden treasures, and new G*odlike powers to discover. The flow of the game plays out like most modern Western RPGs. You have a main quest, but if you see a landmark out in the distance, you can go there, and there might be a side quest. There are also bounty hunts for extra coin and better gear. The combat system is similar to that in other first-person Western RPGs like Skyrim. You swing a sword or cast magic, hold down the attack button to do a powerful attack, and can block with a shield or larger weapon. What's different here is the abilities you can acquire by leveling up and using ability points to unlock them. These can be bound 1-6 or by using a wheel as well as binding your companions' abilities to order them to do things on the fly. The combat system has weight and can feel good in the beginning of the game, but it clearly has its flaws and gets old after quite some time. This is due to combat happening constantly and enemies being damage sponges. Skyrim and Oblivion worked because combat was over fairly quickly, and it wasn't too frequent unless you were in a small dungeon. Despite having varied ability upgrades like adding splash damage, poison, or having effects last longer, I never felt powerful enough in this game. The G*odlike abilities even feel useless. Even with fully upgraded equipment, I always felt like every enemy was a sponge unless I fought enemies that were at a much lower level than me if I went back to early maps. It doesn't help that abilities use up essence, which runs out fast unless you have potions, which are expensive, and you can't craft them unless you are a Druid. Lame. This is all due to the game using equipment levels instead of player levels, which I absolutely hate in RPGs. This means no matter how many abilities you have, no matter how much you've d*umped into attribute points, you will never be able to do any damage until your equipment level meets or exceeds the enemies in the area. This means upgrading armor and weapons, and each level has three tiers. Higher tiers and legendary equipment require rare items. This means hunting these rare materials down either in shops or in drops from enemies or certain chests. This requires looking it up online and constantly halting story progress. You can craft weaker materials or rarer materials, but it's still a grind. I hate these multi-tiered systems that are there just to add to the grind. You can also use food items to cook food for temporary boosts in battle. Legendary equipment can only be upgraded with specific items too. There were many points that stopped my game because I didn't have enough money to buy a higher-tiered weapon to advance through the next area. I then had to do things like side quests, bounty hunts, and just sell random c*rap to grind for coins. The economy system is very much broken in this game, thus the many mods out there that balance it out more. Rewards are piddly scraps even for beating large bosses. On top of that, the equipment system itself is frustrating. Items like rings and signets only offer minor stat boosts, and armor only reduces damage and determines your stamina fatigue rate for the most part. You can use the same piece of armor through an entire map as long as you upgrade it. There's not much fun in that. There are ranged weapons like flintlocks, bows, and rifles, but the reload time is very slow, and I found them useless unless you are specializing in those weapons. There are also elemental "grenades" that can be used to break barriers leading to hidden areas or damage enemies. Sure, it all works, but is this system fun and engaging? No. It felt like schoolwork trying to balance out my build. A lot of the open areas have enemy groups, but they never respawn. Once they are dead, that is it for the game, so this requires you to go everywhere in the game and forces you to pretty much complete every quest, which is annoying. There are fast travel points scattered throughout, and the campsites are an isolated instance where you craft and upgrade. Exiting here allows you to change the time of day and whether to warp back to the last spot you were in or continue on. Side quests show up as blue exclamation marks on the map, and these are fairly uninteresting. They are just there for enemy fodder and don't add to the lore like Bethesda games do or even The Witcher. Some games use these to expand on lore, like discovering a folktale in games like The Witcher or having individual side quests help explain or tell the smaller details in the lore itself through the mission. These are also usually clearly crafted and feel much different from main missions, but here you are just running around killing everything and collecting something for someone, which leads to a boring dialogue session. That leads me to the lore, world, and characters themselves. The Living Lands look pretty but aren't anything special. It's stuff we have seen numerous times in Western RPGs. A volcanic area, jungles, giant mushrooms, medieval towns, dwarves, massive trees with twisting roots, etc. The game doesn't have a particularly unique art style and looks like generic European fantasy. It's not bad at all, just nothing special. The races in the game are the most original part. Outside of dwarves (who don't look right, by the way), humans, and elves, there are the Orlans, who are a cat-like race, and the Aumaua, who are scaly, amphibian-like creatures. These two races were very interesting to see, and the NPC companions are really interesting to learn about and talk to. You can get to know them more in camp via a very long dialog tree that you unlock after major story events. Kai is a smart-mouthed Aumaua, Marius is a disgruntled dwarf, Giatta is a proud wizard, and Yatzli is a sassy and frisky Orlan wizard. The other NPCs, such as faction leaders, bosses, and various others, are pretty much forgettable. I never cared to finish out all dialogue options with most characters. This is also an Unreal Engine 5 game, so it's poorly optimized. While the visuals look good and there's a lot of detail in everything, unless you have a modern PC, it will run like cr*ap and rely heavily on frame generation. Lowering settings won't give you much room to work with, and like other UE5 games, it is very VRAM dependent, which heavily affects performance. Anything under 8GB is pretty much useless. However, if you can use frame generation with AI upscaling or just run at 1080p or lower, the game does smooth out and play fine. That leads to the overall world and wraps back around to the first question. Does this give me the warm, cozy Western RPG feeling from a game that I can't wait to get back to? No. I couldn't wait for this game to end, and it felt like it dragged out more and more as the game went on, mainly due to constantly having to upgrade my equipment, and getting the resources to do that was a long grind. I never looked forward to the next area, as every 50 feet was just another group of damage-sponge enemies. While there are plenty of enemy types, they are forgettable and fall under the same European RPG tropes, such as giant spiders, golems, generic enemies in armor, elementals, bears, etc. None of the enemies really stood out, nor did the bosses. Nothing in this game feels unique. Just copied and pasted from other games. Even with a more refined first-person combat system, the abilities don't add much, and you just never feel like you're getting the edge on enemies. Finding that really cool rare weapon behind a puzzle in the game doesn't give you an edge. It might just be a weaker unique weapon that you need to upgrade more, which requires grinding for more materials. Sometimes these are worth more in gold than in use. It's a crying shame that Avowed's unique story and premise went to waste on such an unbalanced and generic game.