Avowed Review – Too Close To The Sun

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In essence, just like The Outer Worlds from Obsidian felt very similar to a sci-fi Fallout, the upcoming game Avowed closely follows the vibe of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in its fantasy setting. While the world isn’t as vast or seamlessly connected, it might be hard to tell them apart at first glance, particularly during its intense first-person combat scenes. Avowed takes many beloved features from the classic RPG and enhances them, with significant improvements noticeable in its refined combat system. This enhancement also extends to a shift away from conventional leveling systems towards a gear-based approach, and providing more freedom to mix and match various weapon combinations. However, not all of Avowed’s innovations are successful, leading to an adventure that sometimes leaves you surprised but equally frustrated.

As a Godless one, washed ashore in the Vital Realms, your adventure begins. Born with unique, sometimes alarming facial characteristics due to divine favor, you are chosen few. Your task is urgent: trace the origin of a contagion that’s transforming the people of this land into mindless, bloodthirsty beings, before it reaches your distant monarch’s domain. While Avowed shares the same universe as Pillars of Eternity, it skillfully separates you in an isolated region, making it accessible for newcomers with minimal prior knowledge. However, it occasionally references historical events to enrich the narrative and help understand the characters’ attitudes towards various factions and occurrences around you. A glossary of significant names and places is provided as they come up during dialogues, offering context and clarity.

In Avowed, your character makes an immediate impact by showcasing your non-belief in gods, albeit with an unusual twist: you’re the first one who doesn’t know which deity has chosen you. This detail isn’t central to the mission at first, but a surprising event early in the game changes that, setting up a more engaging response to the plague sweeping through the Living Lands. Unfortunately, this intriguing setup is not fully realized as the two main narrative threads tend to follow predictable and unremarkable paths, making the overall story forgettable. The dialogue does offer some delightful exchanges, with both serious and witty responses allowing you to bring humor to grim situations effectively. However, the gravity of the plague you’re trying to eradicate and your personal quest to understand why you’re the only non-believer without a god lack the captivating depth that they could have had, sticking to a narrative path with few deviations into unexpected directions.

In the game, your decisions significantly impact various aspects of the virtual world and influence certain plot developments in intriguing ways. For instance, a character I rescued at the onset of the game reemerged later to aid me in completing an additional mission without requiring a substantial amount of money or resorting to violence. This unexpected yet fitting event integrated the character into a group of outlaws who would have posed issues had I not shown kindness earlier, thereby benefiting both myself and the character within the game’s narrative.

In another situation, I tactfully sidestepped a conflict by completing certain side missions in a particular sequence. The final decision I made at the end of one mission opened up dialogue options in a later part of the chain, steering our conversation towards a friendly resolution. These moments are memorable due to their organic feel, making my actions seem meaningful within the game world without explicitly highlighting where my choices might be significant or insignificant. This same principle applies to the main quest, although the decisions there are more clear-cut, like fork-in-the-road situations that significantly impact characters’ responses to you. However, their straightforward nature makes them less subtle (and hence, less intriguing).

A key issue with Avowed’s storyline lies in its one-dimensional companions. Kai, who you meet early on, jumps into your quest after a brief initial chat without enough development as to why. Characters like Giatta the animancer and Yatzli the mage have more discernible reasons for joining your group, but none of them are exceptionally intriguing or multi-layered. Despite their combat skills and abilities enhancing the gaming experience, they fail to generate interest in their personal histories and their growing bond with your character.

In Avowed, the story transitions through several vibrant and breathtaking hubs, each offering a distinct visual appeal. The lush forests and picturesque coastlines of Dawnshore contrast starkly with the barren deserts of Shatterscarp, where splashes of vivid color and soft lighting entice you to appreciate the surroundings. These hubs serve as expansive areas for exploration once unlocked, each featuring a city aligned with a specific faction, side quests, hidden treasures, and more.

Navigating Avowed is an enjoyable experience due to its emphasis on vertical exploration, facilitated by a well-designed platforming system that allows for confident jumps and skillful leaps towards ledges. This is further enhanced by engaging platforming challenges scattered throughout the map, often leading to valuable loot or stunning vistas.

Avowed distinguishes itself from its influences by refining its platforming mechanics into something more intentional. The game’s world has been thoughtfully designed to accommodate this new system, creating a seamless and immersive experience.

Avowed draws upon some of the most outstanding features from a classic RPG and enhances them, yet not every innovation in Avowed is a triumph, resulting in a role-playing journey that both amazes and aggravates.

The finesse displayed in Avowed’s battle system seems to surpass its evident inspirations, offering a rich and diverse range of choices when constructing your offensive repertoire. From traditional swords and shields to dual-wielding mystical grimoires and elemental rifles, there’s no shortage of weapons to experiment with. Avowed encourages experimentation by allowing you to swap between two loadouts at any given moment, enabling a swift transition from close-quarter slashes to long-range spellcasting with just a button press. The action feels tactile and substantial; each swing of an axe seems to drive it deep into your enemies, while magical blasts fill the screen with vivid effects, underscoring their potency. Delayed finishers, which can be executed once you’ve depleted an enemy’s stamina bar, allow you to savor the violence, although other actions like parrying may not always feel as smoothly animated and consistently rewarding. The combination of your unlockable abilities with those provided by your companions adds a layer of strategic depth to combat that is rewarding to explore.

In the heat of battle, you’re drawn to experiment with various weapon types to see how they function and appear during skirmishes, yet it’s odd that such weapons are seldom found in chests, rewarded as quests, or scattered across the map. Merchants provide an option for buying new weapons but at exorbitant prices, leaving you to use whatever luck brings your way. Creating some effective combos, like wielding a sword and pistol, offers thrilling combat with high damage output but requires careful evasion, but ability upgrades tend to limit that, pushing instead for focusing on specific weapon types. These upgrades are more like those found in traditional RPGs where you’re tailoring towards a particular build, rather than ones that promote experimentation with unique and intriguing combinations. It can be challenging to make the most interesting combos work harmoniously in Avowed, as it’s much more efficient to stick with one-handed weapons and enhance their damage and critical chances, rather than spreading your limited ability points across various types, making you a generalist.

A significant issue arises in Avowed’s gameplay due to an uneven progression that limits your choices for creating a robust character class. Unlike typical RPGs that increase enemy difficulty with numerical level scaling, enemies here are defined by the quality of their equipment. As you advance from one hub to another, tougher opponents swarm, requiring constant upgrades to your own gear to face them effectively. The challenge lies in the scarcity of crafting materials, making it hard to maintain even a single armor piece and two weapons at par with the escalating enemy power level. Merchants are equally stingy with resources and weapons, leaving you with few options to advance your existing equipment or buy a new weapon to speed up the process. This situation forces you into specializing in just one type of weapon and class, rendering the second loadout obsolete even before reaching mid-game.

While side missions aid in earning money, they don’t significantly reduce the need for materials in the game. The rewards often fail to make a substantial impact on the high costs of premium items sold by merchants, and equipment rewards seldom compensate for this gap. Finding an exceptional weapon with unique properties can be both satisfying and frustrating due to the challenges in switching from your current, upgraded gear setup. You have the option to respec at a flat cost, allowing you to rebuild your character around a new, advanced tier weapon, but accumulating enough gold for this is tricky. Despite focusing on side missions and additional content in each of Avowed’s hubs, it’s rarely sufficient to prevent your allies from repeatedly urging you to upgrade your armor and weapons to survive combat.

In this game, intense conflicts transform into lengthy skirmishes where you’re exposed to rapid series of attacks while gradually wearing down an enemy. Larger groups can be extremely hazardous, as even a single or two enemies who are a few levels above yours can pose significant threats due to the time required to defeat them and the ease with which they can defeat you. Combat situations also escalate in a way that implies you should handle them effortlessly, as hordes surge into fights and quickly overpower you and your two teammates. Checkpoints are less forgiving than expected, often forcing you to replay multiple encounters you’ve already struggled through. These challenges were common on the game’s Normal difficulty setting, with a total of five difficulties available at any time. I tried reducing the difficulty to Easy, but it only slightly improved my chances of survival in late-game battles. Despite not promising a straightforward power fantasy, the game is currently unbalanced, leading to persistent frustration.

In several aspects, the game Avowed appears quite promising, yet it seems to fall short in delivering on its potential. The combat is engaging and provides room for exploration, but it’s constrained by a heavy emphasis on equipment enhancements and limited resources, which restricts the creative freedom it seems to offer at first glance. The world within the game is enjoyable to traverse, but the narrative fails to weave an engrossing story with a fulfilling ending. The experience frequently oscillates between thrilling moments and tedious periods, often tilting towards the monotonous as you approach the game’s final stages. While Avowed may seem poised to usher in a new era for fantasy role-playing games, it’s uncertain if it will leave a lasting impression like its predecessors.

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2025-02-13 17:39