Game Review: Avowed

Liam May || Issue 14 || February 25, 2025

Avowed is a complex game to review. I am one of Obsidian Studios’ biggest fans. I loved Fallout New Vegas. My squad and I have played hours upon hours of Grounded, so not coming away with a similarly happy experience left me thinking I was reviewing wrong, not that the game had issues. In the end, it has a good base and can become something great, but I found it underwhelming, especially compared to the other First-Person Story RPG I played recently, Kingdom Come 2. I found the combat animations weird and claustrophobic, the world very lacking in immersion, and besides graphics, I thought there were very few things that stood out about this game. The story was unique, but it is nowhere near the openness levels of Skyrim. Many things such as Item Collision, Town/NPC Interactions, and Physics are surprisingly subpar compared to older games. However, I have
to say that while the story was a tad cliche, with “Outlander comes from afar to fix the frontier’s issues” being the prevalent theme, I found the world and Soul plague to be quite interesting. Having never played Pillers of Eternity, which is the world the game takes place, I was glad for an opportunity to check out the setting. In addition, I found the issue of the “Last of Us but magical” zombie issue intriguing yet ultimately underwhelming like most other aspects. I also thought locking the character behind playing a Godlike Envoy instead of letting players have a more free-form character creation be
far more annoying than immersive. In the end, Avowed is not for everyone, but as someone who has played over 100 hours of games in this genre, I think playing Outer Wilds, Grounded, and Fallout New Vegas is a better Support of Obsidian than wasting money on the 70-dollar price tag of Avowed.