When you say a game is ‘unfinished’, it conjures up very specific images. Ones filled with flat textures, blank NPC faces, clipping through walls and floors, and a general bugginess blockading your every move. Despite Avowed director Carrie Patel warning players of “jank”, this is not the way Avowed is unfinished. It is unfinished on a deeper, and unfortunately far less fixable, level than simply needing a couple of weeks to work out the kinks.
Every avenue you explore in Avowed feels like a dead end. It’s a game that strives for a depth it cannot achieve, but has overcommitted to that depth. At one point I spoke with a council, and both members were dismissive of my plan.. Privately, one of them found me afterwards to admit it was a ruse and plot against the other. I told the other and… she didn’t believe me. Nothing changed, it was the illusion of role-playing inside a set narrative. Another time I had no choice but to fight characters marked as ‘Desperate Smugglers’ before reaching the top of their camp and discovering these smugglers were desperate, at which point I had the option – which was really an obligation – to help them instead. There are dozens of examples of this, big and small, across Avowed.
Avowed Is A Shallow Experience
It doesn’t help that the narrative is so reliant on tropes that I never felt hooked. In something of a killer twist for the fantasy genre, a blight of some sort is plaguing the land. Many of the key events could be summarised like this, in ways you’ve heard a hundred times before. The occasional times it steps away from these training wheels, we see traces of that ‘unfinished’ element come back in.
One of your companions has had (I’ll simplify here) their parents turned into trees. You discover this as you meet them, when they send you down to their basement, which they apparently have not been into since the incident. This plays out in about five minutes of idle fetch quests, yet is given melodramatic pomp and circumstance. This was likely originally a larger quest, like two other companions get as part of the side quest adventures. The fourth? Well. She gets nothing.
It leaves Avowed feeling a little bit like playing Dungeons & Dragons with a DM who is good at voices, but not much else. Quests feel derivative, and any choices offered are surface level, either all leading the same way, being a choice between obvious good and bad, or leading the same way while offering an obvious choice between good and bad. It’s a game that teases depth but cannot deliver, a far greater sin than simply not having much to begin with.
Envoy & Kai: Up Your Arsenal
Gameplay wise, things are a lot better. Avowed can be played in first- or third-person, and seems equally suited to both. I played the majority in my preferred third, and despite this being thought of as the atypical experience, I had no complaints. Aside from all those above about the narrative, but I can’t imagine first-person would have helped there.
Avowed emphasises loadout variety, giving you two sets to wield at once and the option for off-hand weaponry too. Throughout the game, I used: pistol and shield; shield and sword; sword and wand; wand and spear; spear and grimoire; grimoire and axe; and axe and pistol. That’s before you get to the two-handed options for swords, hammers, axes, bows, and arquebuses.
This variety offers a chance to approach combat differently, and I especially appreciate the delicate balance it manages with guns. Though powerful, they (as is historically accurate to the time period) take an age to load, making them feel within the game’s power structure rather than derailing the existence of magic. It’s not perfect (they still have ‘charged’ attacks somehow, and are useless until mid-game with how slow they are), but it’s a valiant effort to mix firearms and wizardry.
Combat is, however, harder than you might expect, and melee combat is clunky without a proper lock-on mechanic.
The skill trees also offer this. There is no set class system in Avowed, allowing you to take abilities from the Fighter, Ranger, and Wizard tree at will. I would say I played as a Wizard, favouring a wand plus off-hand build and making heavy use of fire spells, but I also took a ghostly bear summon and crit boosts from Ranger, while I wore Fighter’s heavy armour and switched to a two-handed sword or hammer as needed. The flexibility comes at a price – many skills feel redundant and it pushes you to be a jack of all trades – but I suspect most players will prefer it. I certainly did.
Ultimately though, it feels like your console has been soaked in treacle while playing Avowed. Healing, switching weapons, charging attacks, moving, even conversations take an age to happen. When you heal, you don’t get the health benefit immediately, but slowly grow into it, making it useless while under attack. This, along with switching, charging, and moving, can all be upgraded via the skill trees, but all these do is get you to a normalcy where the game should have started, instead of making you feel superhuman. As for the laborious conversations that drag on with little exposition or personality on offer, the skill trees cannot save you.
Avowed Is Good But It Wants To Be Great
There is a general level of quality to Avowed. It is not ‘unfinished’ in the way that counts for triple-A games, and while I doubt anyone will mark it down as a classic, there is a scope here that remains impressive. Sure, there are dead ends, but there are a lot of them. It took me 40 hours to finish the game the first time, and between the bounties I didn’t wrap up and some unexplored far reaches, I think there’s another 10-15 hours of juice in here.
‘The food’s not great, but such generous portions’ sums up how I feel about Avowed. The varied but overused combat inside a narrative it’s hard to feel anything for holds Avowed back, but doesn’t knock it down. If you’re looking for a game that takes you here, there, and everywhere with enough health bar whittling to feel like a challenge, Avowed delivers middle of the road sustenance. You’ll want to finish it, though you might find yourself wondering why.
Avowed is a valiant attempt at fantasy you can play your way, but while it delivers well enough with combat, the narrative just isn’t there. Too ambitious in what it wants to do, it falls way short. It’s a very mediocre version of the masterpiece it tries to be, but it’s also a solid version of Just Another Video Game. The story goes nowhere and all ends the same way, but maybe the journey is just about worth it.
Reviewed on Xbox Series S
- Released
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February 18, 2025
- Limited jank, despite warnings from the director
- Varied approach to combat
- A long time if not always a good time
- Shallow characterisation and narrative
- Disappointing lack of choice beneath the veneer of roleplay
- Side quests are far too simplistic