I’m about 12 hours in and digging Avowed so far, which is notable for me because I bounced off The Outer Worlds hard. It’s not a groundbreaking RPG by any means, but it’s just plain fun. If you’re like me and were wary about it, I’d recommend giving it a try on Game Pass.
The combat is enjoyable and much more kinetic than I anticipated. Lots of movement, dodging, and placement. Stunning, immobilizing, and aggroing enemies can be important as the game frequently puts you in combat situations where you’re outnumbered. There are plenty of weapons and skillsets that can be mixed and matched to suit however you want to play. I’m currently playing a gun mage and having a blast. Respec’ing your entire build is cheap and easy, assuming you have the right gear saved for what you’re spec’ing into.
Dialog options are deep and the voice acting is superb, as expected. The random banter between your companions at camp is entertaining and always makes me pause just to listen. Edit - The story so far is alright, nothing amazing, but it moves things along. Plenty of lore, especially if you're already versed in the world of PoE (I'm not), but you don't really miss out on anything if you gloss over it.
While not open-world, the regions are dense and fun to explore. Poking around off-path usually rewards you with something. The game is very vertical too. Sometimes when you think you’ve gone as high as you can go and found some goodies for that dopamine hit, you can actually climb even further and find more stuff. Enemies do not respawn and I haven’t come across any backtracking quests yet, so once you clear an area you’re effectively done with it. I don’t mind this at all, but some might. I do think it would be nice if there were some respawns, but I can understand why they did it.
The game also does a good job of not getting in its own way. Some of the QoL elements are what people tend to mod in to games like this anyway, like no carry weight on consumables and crafting materials. Only weapons and armor weigh anything. And if you do get overburdened you can simply send items back to your camp directly from the inventory menu, wherever you are. On that note, you can also reach back to your camp chest while at any merchant to sell things out of it, without having to load up for a sale run. You can also change the UI marker icons to be less intrusive and more encouraging of exploration.
All that said, I’m not very far in of course and there’s still plenty of time for it to turn stale. But considering I couldn’t even get a few hours into Outer Worlds? Avowed is looking like a win in my book.
