We spent over 60 hours in Obsidian's latest RPG Avowed – the new game from the developers of Fallout: New Vegas, The Outer Worlds, Pentiment and the underrated Grounded – and after exploring every corner of the Living Lands it's clear they have another hit on their hands.
Coming from a renowned studio like this, we had high expectations and we're happy to say that Avowed pretty much met them all. It's a throwback first-person action RPG that manages to do everything well, from the role-playing elements to the combat.
The story of Avowed is a spinoff of another one of Obsidian's popular franchises Pillars of Eternity, but if like us you never got around to playing their acclaimed RPG series, don't worry, as Avowed stands alone and is a great entry point to the lore and world they've built.
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One design choice Avowed succeeds in is that the game's areas are divided by open zones rather than one big open world. There are four in total as you progress through the game, and they are perfectly crafted to be jam-packed with content but still big enough to feel vast and expansive but never overwhelming.
Skyrim meets Dishonored is the best way to describe it, with the fantasy setting and level design feeling specifically curated to be dense with discovery while making use of verticality in a way many big RPGs don't.
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The maps in Avowed make you want to keep exploring to see what is around the next corner, as you can guarantee you're going to find something, whether it's a treasure chest, a boss or a completely new area where you stumble across a side quest that will have implications in the story later.
Each new zone unlocks as you progress the story, but you can return at any time to keep exploring or take on any quests you skipped. We were very thorough, but almost every time we returned to any previous area we would find something we missed, which says a lot about the amount of discoveries crammed into every nook and cranny of the world.
When playing a game in the RPG genre, one of the most important factors for us is player choice and how decisions impact the story, and Avowed repeatedly finds ways to make everything seem meaningful, such as dialogue options being influenced by side quests, information learned in notes you can find in the world, and previous interactions with other characters.
Something else we found effective is how notes written in the game world will change depending on the choices you make, with characters mentioning events unique to your journey and making it feel like a tailored experience that adjusts to your path.
These little nuances are impressive considering the game basically allows you to do side quests in any order, with zones fully explorable from arrival. Oftentimes the main story quest would benefit from going off the beaten track, as we'd stumble across something in the world that has big ramifications for events in the main game and ultimately change its outcome.
An example of this is a random side quest we stumbled upon early where the resolution to it didn't manifest until the end of the game, which made our choices feel that more rewarding, with the side content never really feeling like filler but instead meaningful content that felt just as important as the main story.
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It's clear with Avowed that the more you put in the more you will get out, not only with its optional content but with the companions you travel with during the game. As the story unfolds you have a travelling party of four people, two of which you can take with you on your journey at any given time.
They fight alongside you and you can even use their abilities like you would in something like Mass Effect. They have their own stories and optional companion quests and while they can feel a little stereotypical at first, the conversations at camp are worth having and regularly bring weight to the characters and game in general. After all, it's hard not to care about best bro Kai when he has the voice of Mass Effect's Garrus.
Your companions will regularly chime in during conversations, with other NPCs acknowledging them, especially if they have a history with them. You can make decisions that affect them, with some even having the potential to make them leave, and during our playthrough we also had romantic dialogue options for a companion, so romance can occur in some form even if it's not an explicitly embedded system.
The narrative and outcomes are overall well done, with plenty of shades of grey and tough decisions to make. There seems to be quite a few endings and variations where your satisfaction may vary depending on how much time you sink into side quests and your companions. In our experience, it definitely pays to do as much as you can to get the most from the game's story and conclusion.
The combat is some of the best combat to ever be put into a first-person action RPG like this. It always feels snappy and responsive. Whether you're using swords, guns, bows, giant hammers or magic, every class feels viable and fun to play, with the game making it easy to change it up at any time and allowing two loadouts to instantly switch between during battles.
Avowed has two-handed weapons like great swords and an arquebus, but also lets you equip one-handed weapons in each hand, allowing some fun dual-wielding combos. For example, you can have a spell book you peeled off a dead wizard in your left hand while having a unique electrified pistol you found in a secret cave in your right.
Another cool thing about Avowed is when the game calls for you to use your tools and abilities to solve environmental roadblocks to find secrets and alternate paths, like blowing up cracked walls with grenades, burning vines with fire or even using ice spells to create pathways on water surfaces. The game is littered with these light immersive sim elements and we'd love to have seen them pushed further, but they're still a welcome addition.
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Movement also feels incredibly fluid with a parkour-style system that allows you to climb things easily and embrace the game's approach to verticality. There's also a dash that's helpful during combat and a bunch of other upgrades in the game's skill tree that can change how you play.
Not all skills can be unlocked during one playthrough so you'll have to pick and choose what is best for your playstyle and character, with fighter, ranger and wizard skills all offering unique and worthwhile traits that contribute a lot to combat variety.
The good news is that for a modest in-game sum of coin you can reset and rebalance these anytime you like, meaning you can try your hand at something new if you just found a frost accumulating axe you want to test out and get the most out of.
One thing that needs to be commended about Avowed is how streamlined everything feels. All of its systems like armour and weapon upgrades, difficulty scaling, crafting and pretty much every aspect of the game feels designed to be as approachable as possible and never overcomplicated. This also includes quality-of-life stuff like transmog and the option to also respec stat points at any time.
Avowed is incredibly fun to play and the team at Obsidian have done a great job of building on what they know by creating a very satisfying RPG that does everything it sets out to well. The drawback of this is that it can in places feel a little safe, where people looking for an innovative and fresh experience might not find it here.
The game being very tightly designed and, as mentioned previously, streamlined in every aspect is a very calculated decision for better or worse. For example, almost every quest and dungeon will neatly loop around to mitigate backtracking which is definitely nice as a player, but can make the world feel a little sanitised.
This is also prevalent in design choices like not being able to kill NPCs or most animals, there's no stealing or pickpocketing, and most of the time you can trespass with no consequences. Small things like this combined with the zones following the same gameplay loop slightly dilute that feeling of anything can happen.
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The game makes up for it by having a world full of things you want to see and traverse, and being fun to play means you'll want to do all of it. Sprinkled among the game's quests are things like treasure maps, light environmental puzzles, unique bosses in the form of bounties and artefacts to collect that encourage travelling far and wide.
There's lots of other details buried in the game like random encounters that serve no purpose other than to settle a dispute between two arguing NPCs, or helping someone find something they lost nearby – these don't even show up on your quest log but reinforce how content rich Avowed is – which in turn means there's very little downtime and always something intriguing in your eyeline.
Avowed is full of consequential player choices, meaningful side content and rewarding exploration all backed up by slick movement and some of the best combat in a first-person action RPG. It might not reinvent the genre, but Obsidian has achieved everything they set out to by creating a super fun adventure worth your time.
Platform reviewed on: Xbox Series X
Avowed releases on Tuesday, February 18 on Xbox Series X|S, PC and Game Pass. It's available today if you buy the Premium Edition.
