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Spend a few hours in Avowed, and youll start to feel as if the NPCs are obsessed with wood. Open any chest or lockbox, and inside youll find a branch or two hidden away for safekeeping. It might seem strange at first. But dont worry it wont be long until you understand why its so important to them.Avowed partially follows a level-based progression route: explore, fight enemies, get a quest, fight more enemies, finish the quest, and get experience points. Get enough to level up, and get points to put into your attributes (Constitution for extra health, Resolve for extra stamina, and so on) and new abilities (like Shield Bash for fighters, Parry for rangers, and Fireball for wizards). But this belies the real leveling system, which is focused on the quality of your weapons and armor.Improving these requires crafting resources: wood, leather, metal ingots, and certain plants. If youre using tools that are lower leveled than those of your enemies, combat becomes a nightmare of trying to survive massive hits while only doing chip damage in return. And you will run into enemies that are stronger than you at every turn, making much of the game into a single-minded, desperate scavenger hunt. Suddenly, every branch that might finally make your wand one level stronger looks like a miracle.The opening hours of the game dont give this away. Avowed introduces (or reintroduces, for Pillars of Eternity fans) a world of gods, plague, and political intrigue. The game also promises questions of empire, ecology, and autonomy amid systems far beyond your control. It suggests specificity: this is Eora, these are its people, get sunk into this world. But that doesnt last.In one mid-game main quest, for example, youre going through three trials: Strength (fighting enemies), Wisdom (avoiding traps that appeared in exactly the same form in Skyrim 14 years ago), and an unspecified one that seems to exist solely to fulfill the rule of three and involves walking down a corridor before once again getting into a fight. There are lore reasons for this that loosely hook into the specificity I enjoyed at the beginning of the game, but they feel like a peeling coat of paint over a tired, repetitive base.There are ways to avoid conflict sometimes, but most of the game will be spent fighting. The combat system allows you to mix and match between the three classes and different weapons: two-handed and single-handed melee; bows; and wands and grimoires. You can also take abilities from any of the classes at different times. In practice, though, splitting between different approaches didnt feel especially worthwhile, and I ended up focusing exclusively on wizardry.Spellslinging combat involves balancing stamina (used for basic attacks) with Essence (used for spellcasting) and directing your companions. When it works, this rhythm is satisfying. When it doesnt work like when you run out of Essence potions, or when enemies are at a higher level than you it becomes a grind. When there is any kind of complexity in enemy types, it collapses.Take, for instance, priests and clerics. These opponents can heal any other enemy, making them crucial to take out first. This by itself isnt such a big problem. But theyre often paired with enemies that can cast summons lower-level duplicates that will die when their summoner is killed. Thus, a clear order of operations emerges: kill the healer, then the summoner, then everybody else. But when there are a dozen enemies crowded into one place, thats easier said than done. The fact that enemies will suddenly spawn in new waves makes it impossible to fully plan ahead, and it doesnt help that clerics can sometimes appear mid-fight without you realizing. And its infuriating to have your companions continually engaging a summoned enemy thats being permanently healed unless you are constantly and specifically telling them what ability to use where.Maybe this would be less of a problem if I ever felt that I had enough wood. But despite opening every chest I heard glittering away while I was exploring (if you cant hear them, for any reason, I am fairly convinced this game would be unplayable), stopping in at every shop regularly, breaking down all my extra items (including rare unique weapons), and completing most of the side quests that I ran into, my tools remained perpetually underleveled. And it was always the wood. I had extra plants, just about enough leather, but I constantly needed to find more branches. Metal is used for swords and the like, which I didnt use as a wizard. But I assume if you want to play with melee weapons, this would be the limiter.Avowed should be well paced. There are so many places where it has restraint in scope: discreet areas; not too many main quests; only four companions. Within that structure, it should also be dense. Writing for the companions, in particular, is packed incredibly tightly. Not only do they have preexisting relationships, giving them depth beyond their relationship to the player character, they also interact with one another constantly. In camp, theyll hold conversations about their pasts, their feelings on current events, and general small talk for about as long as youll let them. At one point, I left the game running while I took a break and came back maybe 15 minutes later to find them still chatting.There are individual quests that stand out, too, and some of the lost specificity comes back to the game by the end. In a vacuum, I like how it wraps up its questions. But these moments are lost in the constant, desperate and stop me if youve heard this one before scrounging for wood.Avowedwill be released Feb. 18 on Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Xbox Game Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can findadditional information about Polygons ethics policy here.
