Avowed Review: A Game Pass Original

Flashy... but memorable?

I never played Pillars of Eternity, so when Avowed showed up offering a whole new angle on its universe, my reaction was pretty much that of a shrug. I’m so glad I jumped into it though, because not only have I loved playing it through, it’s also gotten me invested enough in the Pillars world to download and install the original game.

Avowed drops you in the role of the Aedyrian envoy to the politically tumultuous and environmentally hostile island of the Living Lands. Right from the get-go it’s established that Aedyr is a colonising empire, and that the presence of your people is largely an unwelcome one. You also happen to be a Godlike, the bearer of a rare blessing — or a curse — that can afflict any humanoid race. A Godlike is something of a low-key servant of one of the Pillarsverse’s specific gods, but it’s never been clear to your character just which of these gods they belong to.

The reason you’ve been dispatched to the Living Lands is to investigate a blight called the Dreamscourge that has been ravaging its populace.

It’s a narrative set-up that all feels a bit overwhelmingly lore-heavy during Avowed’s first few hours, but the writing and the pacing at which the narrative unfolds consistently kept me engaged and keen to discover more. The fact that it always lets you look up short descriptions of its invented terminology during conversations helps immensely as well.

Despite the thematic weight of its narrative and the heft of its combat loop, (which we’ll get to), Avowed left me with a persistently odd feeling throughout the entirety of the 40-odd hours it took me to complete it. Some of this was due to recurring bugs such as enemy AI derping-out if you pull them too far from their territory, some was due to bizarre feature omissions such as the inability to drop your own pins on the map.

A lot of it though simply came from the sense that it wasn’t really striving to be much more than an enjoyable slice of entertainment to binge across a week until the next thing comes along. This isn’t really a bad thing per se; in fact I found Avowed’s scale and level of ambition to be quite refreshing. When viewed holistically with its AAA price tag and unusually pointed gameplay system structure though, it does make for a strange game to evaluate.

For those thinking that Avowed may be a direct first-person adaptation of Pillars’ old-fashioned role-playing game complexity, allow me to assure you that it isn’t. Avowed instead sets up its mechanical systems to be as breezy as possible in service of fairly challenging combat.

Enemies hit hard and groups of them can easily overwhelm. You can only take two companions out into the wild with you, and their role is mostly to fill whatever utilitarian gaps such as crowd control, tanking, or healing that your own character build is lacking in. You can direct them in the use of their limited suite of special abilities, but Avowed firmly requires you to be the main damage dealer. Fortunately combat is an immensely crunchy blast throughout, and I can honestly say that I truly never grew weary of it.

There are ability trees for warrior, ranger, and wizard classes that you’re free to mix and match, as well as a tree for unique Godlike powers which mostly unlock through plot events. You can also play fast and loose when it comes to weaponry; my preference was to use a pistol in one hand and a melee weapon in the other, with an arquebus to hot-swap to. You’ve also got spellbooks, wands, bows, bastard swords, and war hammers at your command. A lot of options are presented for however you may specifically wish to deal out death, and all of them feel satisfyingly weighty and impactful to use.

It’s a good thing that they do too, because the manner in which Avowed expects you to keep up with its difficulty curve is through constantly upgrading your gear back at your camp. It’s such an utterly core feature that your companions will even aggressively yell as such at you during particularly difficult fights.

Armour and weaponry come in five tiers of quality, with three sublevels in each. Upgrade materials are found constantly throughout the world, but also can be scavenged from breaking down junk weapons and chest pieces (though, weirdly not gauntlets and boots). Breaking trash down can be done on the fly anywhere, as can teleporting items to your camp stash.

Avowed is not built with one seamless open world à la Skyrim, but instead split into five large regions that you progress through sequentially. Crafting mats and the tier of gear you’ll find correspond to each of the five, but lower-level materials can always be combined into higher level ones making the loot you collect on revisitation to prior areas still hold purpose.

If you’re not deep within a dungeon then you can seamlessly warp to any discovered fast-travel points or camps within whatever region you’re currently in, or to the threshold of any prior region. From a camp you can also instantly port back to whatever random spot you warped there from.

Avowed wants you to be out in its world doing things as much as possible and not buried in menus or crunching the numbers between barely-different pieces of loot. There’s always a visible point of interest nearby or a quest not too far away, and the parkour-based movement system makes clambering up and over the environment to reach them feel awesome. Exploring a new region is deeply satisfying to do even before you visit any major settlements as often you can accomplish quests even before you’ve been officially sent on them anyway.

Even the lockpicking system Avowed sports is designed to be breezy. Instead of a minigame that inevitably grows tired after the dozenth go, lockpicks are simply a consumable item; more complex locks require you to burn more of them.

On the subject of crime, there’s zero penalty placed upon you for looting everything in sight either. NPCs will occasionally react to you literally taking food off their table or cash from their desk, but Avowed has no interest whatsoever in mechanically punishing you for doing so.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Avowed. So much so in fact that I was quite bummed that I had to skip a lot of the side-quests in the last zone simply due to the looming deadline of this review. The adventure my gun-toting Godlike experienced was one that I found to be deeply satisfying and consistently fun.

Despite the quality of its storytelling, its overall craft, and the immense pleasure that I had with it, there’s just something about Avowed that makes it feel very much like a product built for a subscription service. Not in a live-service game kind of way, but in a Netflix Original Movie kind of way. It’s something that you will absolutely enjoy spending time with because it’s conveniently available to you, but that you’d inevitably hold to a different standard had you gone out and paid top dollar to experience.

Avowed is a truly strange game from top to bottom. It’s one that I’m sincerely glad that I got to play, but also one I don’t think I’ll remember well down the line. It’s available in non-early access from 18 February on Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC.

Avowed was reviewed using a promotional code on PC provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.

Avowed 18 February 2025 PC Xbox Series S & X   Buy on Windows PC: Microsoft Store, Steam, Battle.net Buy on Xbox: Microsoft Store