Before I get into it, let's spare a moment this Easter to think about the various bad actors I routinely harangue on this site. Those thoughts might not be standard Easter fare, but you'll likely get more mileage from them than the standard thoughts of renewal or salvation would.
Right, that out of the way, Avowed... I rather liked it overall, but, like the title on this article says, I've come to think of it as a "gold-plated" game, meaning it seems very attractive, but scratching below the surface reveals some not-very-attractive elements. Alternatively, you might think in terms of boxed chocolates - it's still chocolate you're getting, but, fair odds, there's coconut creme inside. Some of that may be due to pressures to ship in a timely manner, but it's clear that some of that is rather by design.
Let's start with the setting and story. Avowed is set in the "Pillars of Eternity" world, and I've played a bit of both prior games set there, so I didn't go in totally blind. You come on the stage as an Imperial Envoy, marked as the favored of an unknown god, tasked with finding and fixing the source of the Dreamscourge affecting the island known as the Living Lands, which your empire has set its eyes on for expansion. Past that... well, the Living Lands are such a backwater that the current residents are mostly people looking to get away from the major powers in the world, so your empire's advances wouldn't be welcomed at the best of times. Small wonder, then, that your ship gets fired on and sunk on approach to the harbor. Things progress from there (and I'll refrain from further details to limit the spoiler potential of this review), with choices to make that can have real and lasting impacts on your game, which is always interesting and usually welcome. Let's just say, the story isn't lacking in scale.
However, the setting isn't strictly necessary for the story. Everything happens in what the rest of the world might well consider the "ass end of nowhere". You could swap out any empire with expansion desires (read, pretty much any empire), and the story wouldn't really budge. What the setting mainly gets you is a few extra racial types beyond the standard humans/dwarves/elves fantasy routine, and age-of-sail guns. Plus, when you're building your character, you're pretty well locked down to human or elf, so it's not as if that added variety has a huge impact on your play from the start.
So, let's switch to the more mechanical aspects of the game. You get a starting spread of stats based on your chosen background, which you can improve by leveling up... sometimes. Mainly, your level-ups give you points to spend on skills, be that various combat techniques or spells, separated out into fighter/rogue/wizard archetypes... and you don't get enough of them to cover even all of one archetype in detail, so you can do interesting things like specialize in lightning-based spells, or maybe be more of a generalist, or maybe split between archetypes to make a build suited to a particular style of combat, all of that and more is possible. And, over the course of the game, you gather companions to your party, and can add their peculiar abilities to your combat mix.
But it's not as useful as it seems at first glance. For example, I went the generalist-wizard route with my skill build. Early on, I got some solid use out of things like the Burning Hands equivalent and the Emperor Palpatine sparks-from-the-hands equivalent, but, of course, the spells don't level with you, and continuous spells like those lock down your actions for the duration. By the end, I was pulling down massive area-of-attack spells, with the full expectation that it was just to inconvenience some enemies for a bit and shave a bit off their health bars. Stats, likewise, don't seem to have a large impact on anything, outside of gating off certain conversation choices. And your companions... well, their special abilities can be useful, but you're also artificially limited to having two of them along with you at a time.
Which brings us to combat, gear, and exploring the world around you. When you start, you're literally scavenging from the remains of your shipwreck, limiting your choices. You're incentivized to check every last nook and cranny you see, and quickly get conditioned to expect that straying from the main path will almost certainly reward you with new loot. The first couple of levels are reasonably tough, but, as you load up on gear and get companions, things quickly become more easily manageable. You can also take advantage of catching enemies unaware to deal a bit of extra damage up front, be that with your ranged weapons or your starting "divine backstab" power.
That said, there's more than a few flies in the ointment here. Start with the stealth - yes, I'm sure there's skills you can take to enhance your stealth play, but, especially early on, there's copious "hidey-grass" surrounding every enemy encounter, enough so that I never felt the need to look into that. Heck, sometimes, the hidey-grass clued me in to an upcoming combat long before I saw any enemy combatants. The loot quickly devolves into "meh" once you find out it's a tiered system, just adding a bit of stats to the gear as the tier goes up. On rare occasion, you'll get something actually unique... and you may well decide to sell it or convert it into upgrade materials because you're already attached to another piece of gear and can upgrade it indefinitely (prime example being the pistol I got early in the game that does area-effect electric damage that I kept to the end). And your companions... well, you get to choose their skill upgrade paths occasionally (a little weird, but sure), but there is no way to upgrade their gear. So, late-game, combat is them plinking at enemies, maybe using skills occasionally if you're not explicitly telling them to, and everybody waiting for you to show up and do real damage to enemies one by one with your weapon(s).
So, yeah, it's not a perfect game by any means, and, by the end, I was ready for it to be done. If you're on Game Pass, I'd say give it a go at least, see if it meets your palate. Otherwise? Well, it's a fun story, and it's a pretty game, so I'd say sale-territory for this one.
