Avowed

Avowed was provided by Xbox Game Studios for review. Thank you!

Avowed is the latest first-person RPG from the minds at Obsidian Entertainment. Famed in the past for making games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and more recently, The Outer Worlds, Avowed takes a more "traditional" approach with a fantasy setting and a world full of magic and mystery, and for the most part, they pulled it off nicely.

The storyline is your fairly typical fantasy RPG affair. The game takes place in the wider Pillars of Eternity universe, but the events of either Pillars of Eternity game don't have a bearing on Avowed, so it's unnecessary to have played them. The basis of the storyline is that you are a "Godlike", someone who has been chosen by a god and receives special attributes from birth. Under the employ of the Aedyrian Emperor, you venture into "The Living Lands" to find the source of the "Dreamscourge", a plague threatening the land.

As you meet different characters and factions within The Living Land, you'll encounter many opposing viewpoints on how they think you should handle the situation. It'll be up to the player to decide the fate of The Living Lands. While the game doesn't delve quite as deeply into characters as a title like Baldur's Gate 3, you get some intrigue as you meet characters with differing opinions and political beliefs. For the most part, the characters are all pretty well voiced, too, with some interesting banter between the companions you encounter in the game.

One point I will bring up is that the game likes to give you lots of choices in dialogue, and while NPCs may react differently to your different options, a fair number of these choices appear inconsequential. There's no real difference between the choices that you pick for 90% of the decisions you make in the game. There are key points where the decision you make does matter, but the game does not indicate that being rude or kind to an NPC has any bearing on anything other than the next line of dialogue.

Combat is the main focus of Avowed, and it's a pretty great experience for the most part. You have various weapons to choose from, such as daggers, spears, hammers, bows, and wands, allowing you to play how you want to. If you want to be quick and maneuverable with a melee weapon, you can use a dagger, or want to hit like a truck? Choose a 2-handed melee like a Warhammer. Keep your distance with a bow or a wand and pick off foes while your party members take the hits.

You can specialize your character how you like with the skill tree, which lets you decide your "class" while you play, depending on which skill trees you invest your points into. You can also decide your party members' abilities, allowing you to mold them to benefit your playing style. Adding taunting abilities to a party member, for example, can be useful if you can't take many hits.

This is exactly the path I chose for my character build, opting for one of my loadouts to be a bow (later a gun), and the other to be a wand and spellbook (you can swap between your 2 loadouts with the press of a button), and then speccing my party members into being tanks or at least crowd control, allowing me to keep my distance and deal as much damage as possible from afar.

It worked well, although allies sometimes struggle to defend themselves. There's no way to equip them with armor or equipment, and it feels like they are quite a bit weaker than you in both attack and defensive capabilities.

I did find myself getting annoyed with spellcaster enemies, particularly healers and summoners, as the game seems to give them infinite "Essence" (mana), which means they can indefinitely heal their allies and summon an impossible amount of minions (5+), making it almost impossible to kill any other enemies before them.

I also found that the difficulty spikes in the game are pretty intense. You can go from feeling rather powerful with 1 or 2-shotting many enemies, to the next group of enemies requiring 15 shots to kill, it's pretty bizarre and frustrating. Thankfully, there are several difficulty options to choose from, which can reduce this issue if you're facing it. Although even on story mode, my party member got 1 shot by a spell against some fairly average enemies.

There's also plenty to do in the world of Avowed. There isn't a lot of space that can plague games like this; it doesn't take long heading in any direction before you stumble on a point of interest, and plenty of side quests keep you busy.

While this lack of empty space is a good thing, it can make the game feel a tad busy in the cities. Trying to find your way around the map to reach certain objectives or even find a merchant to buy some goods can be a hassle. There is no way to place a waypoint and no "breadcrumb" system in the game, so you'll just have to keep pausing and bringing up the map to figure out where you are in relation to a store or a quest giver and try to plot a route there yourself.

But again, I could see arguments from players as to whether that's a good or a bad thing. I found it frustrating trying to reach an objective behind a wall by walking one way around the wall and then the other until I found an opening to get inside. Others may appreciate the lack of hand-holding in this regard.

Things can get a little repetitive later, as enemies and items merely become better versions of their former selves. But if you focus on the game's story, it's not that long of a game, beatable in under 15 hours, and by the time you realize the items and weapons are the same, just with higher tiers, you're probably halfway through the game. Regardless, having some slight variations for items would have been cool, as if you find an item that you already have, it will always be identical (unless you have upgraded your item).

Avowed is a very pretty game. The sun-drenched streets, forests, and deserts play to the strengths of the Unreal Engine's lighting, and although it is quite a difficult game to run, it looks good enough to forgive that.

Ultimately, Avowed is a solid first-person RPG. It doesn't quite go as in-depth lore/story-wise as a game such as Baldur's Gate 3, nor is it quite as adventure and exploration-driven as a game like Skyrim, but it does form a neat little space in between those 2 games, with a fairly fleshed-out story and characters, as well as a good amount of action-packed combat and an interesting world.

Avowed - Steam Deck Performance

Avowed has great controller support and supports 1280x800 resolution. It also has a UI Size slider, which I recommend you put on the largest or one below the largest, as it greatly helps with readability on the Steam Deck's screen.

Avowed sets itself to some low settings by default, but we need to adjust it lower. Make sure Ray-Tracing is turned off, as it was on for me, lower FSR3 to Balanced, and make sure all your Quality settings are on "Low". Once you're on these settings, the game switches between CPU and GPU bound, which means we're getting as good as we can get from the Steam Deck.

Your settings should look like the ones below, which I found to be the best for a close-to-30 FPS experience.

The game may appear to be holding 30 FPS, maybe even 40 FPS early on, but once you reach built-up, larger areas, the FPS falls, even on these lower settings, you can occasionally dip below 30 FPS. There are also frequent stutters.

Whether this represents a "playable" experience is a matter of opinion. Can you technically play the game all the way through, albeit at a disadvantage? Yes. But I'm not sure I would have been as generous as Valve was to grant the game a "Playable" badge. I've seen games perform better than those ranked as Unsupported on Steam Deck.

The power draw tends to be high, around 21W-23W, meaning you can only expect about 2 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 1.5 hours from a Steam Deck LCD. The temperature tends to stick around 70C.

Accessibility:

Avowed has a UI size adjustment slider, as mentioned above, it also allows you to embolden certain text to make it easier to read, add subtitles to conversations, and make interactable objects more visible. You may also disable head bobbing, camera shake, and aim assist.

Conclusion:

Avowed feels like a first-person CRPG-lite. Set in a universe with plenty of lore and depth, the story paddles near the surface, going deep enough to be interesting, but not too deep to require you to be well-versed in the lore to enjoy the game. The first-person perspective offers the chance for some action-packed combat, with plenty of variety in weaponry and how players can spec their characters, albeit with some balancing issues.

Steam Deck performance is, simply put, disappointing. The game looks great, even on the lowest settings, but the performance isn't there. Frequent drops below 30 FPS and constant traversal stutter make the game dubiously "playable". You can finish Avowed on the Steam Deck, but you would be forgiven for putting some of the blame for your deaths on an unfortunately timed stutter or frame drop.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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