Avowed review – engaging action meets mundane dialogue in this new RPG

Avowed has a lot to say for itself (Xbox Game Studios)

The makers of Fallout: New Vegas return with a Skyrim style action role-player set in the same fantasy world as Pillars Of Eternity.

Best known for their track record of first class role-playing game sequels, Obsidian Entertainment has been responsible for Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2, and Neverwinter Nights 2. Every one of those bodes well for Avowed, which while not a direct sequel, is firmly based in the same universe as the studio’s two-part Pillars Of Eternity series.

The first Pillars game came out in 2015, following a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign, and as demanded by its backers, it was a solidly old school party-based dungeon crawler. Viewed from high above, in an isometric perspective, it was every bit a digital incarnation of a tabletop adventure game, its 2018 follow-up utilising much the same recipe.

They are both set in the world of Eora and Avowed is too, but this time you’ll be experiencing it from a lot closer up. Viewed in first or third person, the events of Avowed take place in the Living Lands, a lawless island where people and nature run riot. Unfortunately, that riot has been getting steadily more unsettling as a sickness called the Dreamscourge overtakes the natural order. And if that sounds like a pretty generic set-up for a fantasy role-player, we’re afraid that’s not the only thing in the game that lacks pizzaz.

You play as an envoy sent by the Aedyran Empire to find out what’s causing the Dreamscourge and put an end to it. You’re also a godlike, meaning your character has been directly claimed by one of the realm’s deities, which for some reason causes peculiar fungus-style cranial growths to appear. You can customise what they look like during character creation, but quite a few options make them look a lot like a Clicker from The Last Of Us.

Arriving in Paradis, the Living Lands’ largest city and a comparative safe haven on the island, you quickly find out it’s still a hive of scum and villainy. You also discover quite how wordy Avowed is going to be. Every single conversation you have, whether it’s the preamble to shopping with a merchant, meeting a quest giver, or getting to know a more central character, regularly has six or more conversational choices at each stage.

As with most role-playing games, these can be a set of questions you work your way through, but frequently they’re just differing responses, leading you down a broad variety of avenues in your chat. The voice acting is of the bog standard American accented variety, which is inoffensive if a little characterless, and the dialogue itself follows a similar pattern, delivering consistently middle-of-the-road prattle.

The bigger issue is the gargantuan volume of it you’ll have to wade through. Books, notes left by military scouts, shopkeepers whose relatives know one of your party members, animancers whose lives have been upended by the Dreamscourge – it’s a never-ending tsunami of median grade plot and lore exposition. Obsidian clearly finds it all completely fascinating, but we have to admit all those vowel-infused, made-up names and endless, minor callbacks to Pillars of Eternity left us wondering at the dreariness of it all.

Luckily the action is a bit more invigorating. Gathering a total of four potential party members as you explore, you can take two of them with you on any given quest. There’s Kai, your blue scaly Ruataian bodyguard; Marius, a brash dwarf harbouring a painful secret; Yatzli, a feisty, furry mage; and Giatta, a passionate and opinionated animancer.

You then build your three-person team to complement your character’s build, using Marius’ ranged combat, Kai’s tankiness, Yatzli’s spells, or Giatta’s healing. The two you choose will fight autonomously, although you can manually trigger their special moves.

It’s a pity there aren’t any combos or real interaction between their abilities though, and we found little incentive to change party members for different missions, unless one of them had a personal interest in a particular quest. Just like in Mass Effect, each has a side quest just for them, which gives you a deeper insight into their backstories, all of which are then resolved in the final act of the game.

You can play the game from a first or third person perspective (Xbox Game Studios)

Your character has two weapons loadouts that you can switch between on the fly, each of which lets you dual wield pretty much anything you like. That can be a sword or axe and shield, a wand and spell book, or a sword and pistol if you like. There are also two-handed swords, war hammers, rifles, and axes, which take longer to swing or fire, but do a great deal more damage.

When your party makes camp for the night you can use the many crafting materials you collect to upgrade weapons and armour, while levelling up gives you ability points and lets you unlock and improve skills from a wide range of character classes. As ever, it’s worth specialising, although you’re free to pick and choose abilities, and undo them all and start again whenever you like.

As well as chopping up enemies or torching them with magic, there are plenty of encounters that can be resolved peacefully, your choice to spare lives having profound consequences throughout the rest of the game. In practice, when you see a group of enemies it’s hard to know whether they’re the sort that won’t attack or not. After being caught out a few times we found ourselves simply slaughtering everything with a red health bar just to be on the safe side, but on the occasions we held back it was always rewarded, and remembered later on.

The game is largely bug free, except when it comes to the monsters (Xbox Game Studios)

That’s important, because the envoy’s destiny is attached to an unknown god, who you gradually get to know as you progress. It’s to the game’s credit that it’s left entirely up to you how you interpret the god’s actions and enigmatic pronouncements, or how you treat each of the Living Lands’ warring factions. You’re free to help, hinder or annihilate pretty much whichever groups you choose.

That can be fun when someone starts getting a bit high-handed with your party. Just getting bored with their arrogance and attacking them feels like a wonderful release, and despite its grotesque verbosity, the dialogue has a scattering of those moments too. At one point, when the soul of a long lost fellow godlike is giving you particularly elliptical advice, one conversational option is, ‘Just tell me what to do you cryptic b!’ We’ve lost count of the number of times we’d wanted to say exactly that, in this game and numerous others.

It’s a shame so many of Avowed’s 50-odd hours – or less if you’re not a fan of side quests and bounty hunting – is spent in conversation about obscure pieces of lore or, we kid you not, administrative districts and tax regimes. It sometimes feels like watching a fantasy remake of The Phantom Menace, especially as its dialogue gets so comically turgid.

Although Avowed has many interesting elements, compared with other recent role-playing games it doesn’t fair particularly well. Its combat system isn’t as sophisticated or intuitive as Dragon Age: The Veilguard; it has nothing like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s sense of complex systems interacting; and its dialogue, while ripe with choices, has neither the charm nor character of Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s not that it’s innately terrible, there’s just not much it excels at.

Avowed’s strongest suit is traversal, its landscapes proving colourful and imaginative even if they can be tricky to navigate when you’re trying to get somewhere specific. There are fast travel points all over the place, so it’s only infrequently an issue, but opening up new pieces of the map is satisfying, even if in the opening hours it sometimes means stumbling across camps of enemies way above your pay grade.

Despite appearances, it’s also not an open world, instead offering five relatively compact freeform areas to explore. They all have distinct personalities but broadly offer the same sorts of mission and pay-offs, with a fairly narrow range of enemies on which to unleash your party’s increasingly destructive abilities.

Avowed does have a well-developed sense of consequence though. The endings – told in stills with a voiceover – feel rushed, but who you support, what direction the Living Lands take, and even who your final battle is against are all up to you, and it’s more than just a binary choice. The action is also fun, especially once you’ve unlocked a few decent powers. It’s just a shame the journey is bogged down by chatter that’s remorselessly tilted towards quantity rather than quality.

Avowed review summary

In Short: A modestly ambitious action role-player, that’s very good at making you feel you have an impact on the world, but it’s let down by endless reams of mundane dialogue and predictable mechanics.

Pros: Engaging exploration in a set of pleasingly gaudy environments. A wide range of powers to discover, all of which can be reset at will. Your decisions have a lasting effect on the world.

Cons: Far too much unnecessary and uninteresting dialogue, in an often very generic fantasy world. Combat and levelling up is competent but unoriginal, as is the entire game concept.

Score: 6/10

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Release Date: 18th February 2025
Age Rating: 16

Avowed is a bit too wordy and a bit too familiar (Xbox Game Studios)

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