Avowed | REVIEW

“A textbook case of a game director hijacking a project they’ve got no fire for" 

PC | XBOX SERIES

HOW I PLAYED: I played Avowed via Xbox GamePass for PC on my R7 7800X3D , RTX 3080 gaming PC. I was playing on EPIC settings at 1440p with Ray Tracing disabled.

STORY — 09/20 

INTRO 3

I remember those shut-in days of 2020 when an Xbox showcase dropped the first teaser trailer for Avowed. It was a CGI cinematic, but damn, it had some jaw-dropping visuals and oozed gritty dark fantasy vibes. Xbox fanboys were hyped out of their minds, dreaming of this being the title to flex the muscle of their shiny new Xbox Series X (the beefiest console at the time). Meanwhile, you could practically feel the PlayStation fanboys quietly seething that they weren’t getting Avowed on their coveted platform.

Fast forward four years and some change, and Avowed has finally launched! And… what the hell is this???  

 
Is this even the same game we saw back in 2020? It doesn’t look remotely close! That teaser was all about DARK and BRUTAL vibes. This? It’s like a floral display in the Walmart arts and crafts aisle. 
 
The game kicks off with a slideshow dumping the world lore on you (basically screaming, “We couldn’t afford a real cinematic here”). Then you’re shuffled straight into the character creator—which we’ll get to later. After that, you’re hit with another cutscene where your character (who everyone just calls “Envoy”) crash-lands on a deserted island with one lone survivor from your ship. This is where you pick up the basic controls and test out your combat skills. I’ll give credit where it’s due: the controls and combat actually feel pretty slick!
  
But the whole intro experience? Total snooze-fest. I’m not here for this clunky “start with a cutscene, jump to character creator, then another cutscene” nonsense. Just give me one solid opening cinematic to set up the lore, then let me build my character and dive into the action!   
 

That teaser was all about DARK and BRUTAL vibes. This? It’s like a floral display in the Walmart arts and crafts aisle.

CUTSCENES 2

I’ve never played an Obsidian game before, but these cutscenes are bare-bones as hell. The camera just awkwardly swings between each talking NPC and your dead-eyed, expressionless character. Get comfy, because this game is packed with dialogue cutscenes like this.  

There are a few environmental cinematics to highlight world events, but even those don’t hold a candle to PS2-era flair.  

I can't get over how bad all the NPC's and characters look in this game, their faces all look like they are moulded out of wax and having to stare at these hideous facial expressions during the cutscenes is quite jarring.

Watching the cutscenes in Avowed actually makes me wish I was watching the cutscenes in Starfield again..

WORLD BUILDING 2

All the world-building gets shoveled at you through endless dialogue scenes. I’m fine with chatter if it’s sharp and engaging, but when I’m hit with options like “Check out my muscles” three freaking times, it’s a slog... 

I kept wondering who this game is even for with all this yapping. I don’t mind a convo wrapping up with a single dialogue choice, but Avowed drags you into full-on debates where you’re picking multiple options in one go.

Real talk: after a couple of hours, I just started mashing A on the top choice. I didn’t care about the outcomes—or if the options even mattered.  

Throughout the world of Avowed you can find these notes from other NPC's or characters you might encounter late in the game, and this is also how the game decides to deliver some of it's story and lore to you. Usually I HATE these... but after being soft locked into a 20 dialogue option lecture... I WELCOME these notes.

 

OVERALL STORY 2

I know some of you will say I tanked the story experience by not diving into the dialogue choices. But trust me, this plot is the most generic, limp, cookie-cutter snooze imaginable. 

  
It reeks of being penned by a committee terrified of ruffling feathers. I can’t believe this is what we got after that killer teaser trailer. Where’s that game? Can I play that instead?   

I dug into this a bit to figure out, “What the hell happened?” How does a game veer so far off track? What I found is a classic, tired tale in the gaming world.   

Obsidian kicked off Avowed’s development in 2018, right around the time Microsoft scooped them up. Back then, the pitch that got it greenlit was:  

- Skyrim meets Destiny
 

An open-world vibe like Skyrim paired with Destiny’s multiplayer and community hooks. That sounds dope as hell! The team started pre-production, hashing out the vision. Then Xbox needed some hype fuel for the Series X launch, and that’s how we got that 2020 teaser, back when Avowed was still a concept (even into 2019/2020).   

But then 2020 hit, and it was crunch time. Obsidian ballooned their team to juggle The Outer Worlds sequel and finish Avowed. They didn’t even lock in a director until 2021, when Carrie Patel was assigned. Their only prior directing gig? An Outer Worlds DLC, “Peril on Gorgon.” Before that, they were mostly known at Obsidian for narrative design.  

I’m not here to judge a book by its cover, but I’m big on spotting patterns. You ever meet someone and just know how they’d vibe on certain topics? Yeah…  

Looking at this timeline, it’s crystal clear how Avowed morphed from that teaser to what we got. Under Patel’s watch, it ditched the Skyrim-style open world for basic interconnected zones and axed the multiplayer entirely. Oh, and they plopped it into the Pillars of Eternity universe, another Obsidian IP where Patel had narrative chops.  

GRAPHICS — 8/15 

CHARACTER MODELS 2

To put it simply... What the FUCK? 

Let's ignore for a second the whole controversy with the lead design artist. And just look at these default characters in the character creator...

This should tell you enough. I am not going to be one of those completely DELUSIONAL mainstream game critics who will jump through mental hoops to NOT address the issue here.

These characters look fucking stupid. They are offensively bad, and it is by design. The art team working on Avowed, had an agenda and they wanted to ram it down your throat...

Welp... Mission accomplished. I hope it works out well with game sales.

These characters look fucking stupid. They are offensively bad, and it is by design.

ENVIRONMENTS 3

Everything looks like stock Unreal Engine 5 assets. Did they snag this from the UE store, or was it cooked up in-house? Who knows? Either way, it’s all painfully generic. Maybe it’s the lighting and even with maxed-out ray tracing, it still looks flat and uninspired.   

 

A couple of landscapes were decent enough, but I never hit a single “wow” moment with the visuals.   

SPECIAL FX 3

The SFX are solid—magic effects pop nicely. But the environmental effects and basic collision? Total letdown for a game this size. Water effects and terrain textures feel low-effort, even compared to other AA titles. The Outer Worlds isn’t a graphical titan either, but I’d expect more interactive flair from a modern UE5 game. 

 

AUDIO — 6/15 

AMBIENCE 2

The ambience is bare-minimum trash. Just stock open-world noises that never got me pumped during my playthrough. This is a high-fantasy game—you’d expect epic scores and hype tracks. Nope. Most of the music sounds like an AI spat it out with a prompt like “Fantasy, Medieval vibes.”   

BOSS MUSIC 1

Tired, generic “crank the intensity” elevator tunes. And it loops for every boss fight. Pathetic. This is CRIMINAL in a fantasy RPG game! Have none of the devs played a Final Fantasy game or FromSoftware game? The boss battles should be PURE HYPE accompanied by insanely epic scores!

Has the Avowed team ever played games before? 🤔

SOUND DESIGN 3

The effect sounds are genuinely crisp! But the voice acting? Absolute dogwater. These actors are probably solid, but the dialogue feels disjointed, like it’s read out of context. And with so much talking, it grates fast. Good sound design should pull me into the story...here, it just had me rolling my eyes and sighing nonstop.   

Tired, generic “crank the intensity” elevator tunes. And it loops for every boss fight. Pathetic.

PERFORMANCE — 7/10 

FRAME RATE  3

I was actually able to achieve a great framerate with my RTX 3080 getting 100fps + with RT off and generally above 60-70fps with RT ON. But this game suffers from traversal stutters and shader comp stutters as with most UE5 games. So if I visited a town for the first time I would be in stutter HELL! But as long as I did a quick lap around the town it was fine from then on.

STABILITY 4

The game actually ran pretty well, didn't run into any major bugs and Obsidian did perform multiple updates during the first weeks of release making improvements. I ran into a few cosmetic issues and some NPC AI glitches but nothing that wasn't just comically fun or majorly game breaking.

GAMEPLAY — 21/40 

CONTROLS 4

The controls and combat are actually quite fluent and work great! I was genuinely surprised at how well this game plays. All of the weapons and magic feel great and are fun to use. So what the hell??? How do you screw this up so badly? YOU HAD DECENT GAMEPLAY!

MECHANICS 4

I liked the upgrade mechanics and how you could easily switch between weapons and magic without having to re spec your character drastically. I felt like it was very open for players to try new weapons or spells and made combat very creative as you can mix and match and switch between 2 sets of weapons super quickly.

 

PACING 3

The pacing is kind of a crawl but at lease Avowed doesn't force you to take on BS side missions. But my main gripe is getting locked into these massively long dialogue moments that totally kill any momentum the game had built previously. You just fight a boss and triumph over it then you are TRAPPED into a 10 minute YAP session with a deity that sounds like a 90's meditation trance tape.

UI/UE 3

The UI elements and HUD were decent, I felt like they could have been designed a little more sleek. And the start menu and other menu options were ok to navigate. Not terrible but nothing super innovative here.

BOSS QUALITY 2

You fight Bears, Tree women and other generic Skeleton bosses that later turn into regular enemies. Also I hate that every boss fight is basically the same, you fight the main boss as they throw enemy ads at you. The single MOST designed boss in the game is a huge letdown. 

Most times, I would just stumble into a boss fight thinking I was up against regular enemy mobs. Then realized "Oh... this is a boss fight?".

 

ENEMY VARIETY 2

It's the same 5 enemies just color coded depending on the biome you are in. Terrible...

For a huge fantasy RPG the imagination is quite limited on the different types of enemies available in Avowed. Again... maybe you could have cut down on writing terrible dialogue so you could focus more on diverse enemy designs. 🤷🏼

GAMEPLAY VARIETY 2

Your choice is taking on the pointless main quest line or the pointless side quest lines. Side quests and exploration can reward the player with money or items that will help you purchase better items or spells but it is the bare minimum.

REPLAYABILITY 1

There is zero reason to ever play Avowed more than once, I would even question playing it all the way through for a single time. As soon as I finished the game I totally forgot the plot...

BONUS — 0/3

There are some accessibility options in Avowed but nothing major, just typical options that you would see for subtitles and text size, and some gameplay QoL items. It's not bare bones but its not something noteworthy or deserving of a bonus point. 

OVERALL — 52/100 

FAIR

Avowed is a textbook case of a game director hijacking a project they’ve got no fire for. That original teaser trailer had something most gamers could vibe with: a grim fantasy RPG blending Skyrim’s best bits with modern twists. Instead, we got a dull, pointless tale in a bright, cartoony world with plastic-looking characters. Carrie Patel did what they could as director, but this was a mismatch from the jump. It’s a story gaming’s seen too many times: without the original visionary at the helm, it’s doomed to stray from the dream.   

Maybe in some parallel universe, Avowed slaps. Here? It’s a steaming pile of MEH.   
 

PROS

✅ Combat feels great

✅ Using magic and experimenting with weapons is simple

✅ SFX look decent

✅Platforming and Traversal is fluent

 

CONS

❌ Bad writing

❌ Bloated and CRINGE dialogue

❌ Clashing atmosphere

❌Dull characters

TLDR: 52/100 (FAIR) Avowed teased a dark, Skyrim-meets-Destiny RPG, but under Carrie Patel’s direction, it morphed into a bright, soulless slog with interconnected zones and no multiplayer. Endless cringe dialogue drowns out a limp story, wax-molded characters look offensively bad, and recycled enemies bore you to death—though slick combat and magic almost make you forget how far this fell from that 2020 hype.
 

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