Avowed Review Roundup: Here's What The Critics Think So Far

Well the reviews are coming in positive and where most of us thought in the low 80’s. Will I enjoy it - based on the comments- yes I will! I don’t have the expectation that it is the second coming of Skyrim like some of the reviewers…

The best thing about Xbox is that you can play it at no extra cost (if you are subscribed to Game Pass) and have your own opinion/review. 😊

I am looking forward to getting started! roll on 6PM GMT

I'm not normally a person who believes in the xbox tax on reviews but it's weird that there are always some stray 60s pulling down xbox games. It never seems to happen to big games from other publishers that otherwise reviewed very well.

After seeing the universally glowing reviews for Veilguard…I don’t believe any of these critics anymore.

I’ll wait for some folks I trust more to give me their verdict down the road.

I originally wasn’t interested in this title but I’ll definitely check it out in the near future now. The third-person option REALLY makes a difference for me.

An example of double standards regarding innovation in new games and sequels.

Avowed can be fun, but if you've finished even a few popular RPG titles, Obsidian Entertainment's new game won't surprise you with anything new (...) Obsidian has delivered an action RPG with a weak technical component, in which it doesn't do anything exactly new or epic.

From a website rating it 6/10 and submitting the score to Metacritic twice, using two different region websites. That's 6/10 added to the game's score twice, not applying the same filters and criteria to every game they review, in this case, the lack of surprise and innovation.

Re: the VGC review

Who in their right mind leaves side quests till after the main story?? 🤔😄

Depressing to see obsidian, known for narrative and mechanics, make a very simplistic action game that de-emphasizes both.

@Banjo- can be the worst thing though for review section as people who have no intention of playing can have thoughts straight review bombing one stars 😭

I'm not sure what people are besides themselves about. Over 60 reviews and a Meta score of 80, and that's not great? C'mon...

This ridiculous ideology that anything less than a 9 is garbage needs to stop. It's the worse habit gamers' have.

It seems to be that if you haven't played anything like it before, it's an amazing game... but if you played similar before it, it's an OK game.

Never would have guessed a 7/10 from IGN………….

@Decimateh Yes. Reviews have always been subjective and bias is not new, I remember Pokemon 10/10 reviews back in the day and none of them mentioned any lack of innovation, but these days it's hilarious, because the same conclusions are written on the positive side and the negative side depending on the console/publisher.

You are right about many enthusiasts trolling scores (wait until the what score would you give to Avowed poll), but if you ignore them, you can find some descriptive and accurate user reviews. I love when they go into details that are not mentioned in the "professional" reviews, because many of the latter are more focused on having an impact on the readers and Metacritic.

Ouch no enemy variety again? That was one of my issues with the outer worlds. Oh well at least I am only getting it via gamepass.

Xbox tax comments are ridiculous. What makes you think that there’s some kind of agenda. What does a reviewer gain by writing a negative review. Maybe they just didn’t enjoy the game and that’s their opinion and they’re entitled to it. It’s like people just want every game to have a 10/10 score for the metacritic even if the game is pants. If you take your green tinted glasses off maybe they’re just good to great games but nothing mind blowing. 80 is a respectable score

Uff, it was so obvious that this would happen, Xbox tax hits again. Whats with those under 9 and 10 reviews. Just pulling negatives out of the hat as they seem fit. Its hard to say how many of these kind of reviews are on Sony payroll, but atleast we know better, gonna start playing this masterpiece this evening, easily full 10/10! Xbox is pampering us gamers yet again!

@Onlyboxmatters it’s a full 10/10 yet you’ve not played it yet?

@Jonnyfalcon Dude your whole comment history on this website is basically “actually this popular Xbox product does deserve its outlier low review scores” so I’m going to ahead and say this a topic you're clearly biased about.

@RBRTMNZ 😂 that’s because the staggering entitlement of gamers riles me to the point of commenting. Don’t get me wrong I love my Xbox and game pass and the fact that Microsoft is finally pushing out a decent slate of games but I just don’t understand why a game should be expected to be reviewed highly just cause it’s on xbox.

What I’ve seen so far and read looks great just what I wanted and of course 60fps.
Looking forward to diving in.

i caved and bought the premium upgrade last night i've been looking forward to this for a while. i love the colorful art style, obsidian is great, i'm just really looking forward to it.

@Banjo- dont recall spider man 2 to be punished with score for the same lack of innovation. Its a good game but literally copy paste from 1st one with bunch of new abilities and story.
Just an example.

Kinda dont care abour the score tbh. Only if its like low 70s. But anything in 78+ could be good game in the end.

@Millionski Exactly, it's not "a game should be expected to be reviewed highly just cause it’s Xbox", but being fair, being honest and not having double standards. They are surprisingly lax when reviewing certain games (Spider-Man 2, Tears of the Kingdom) and ridiculously pernickety when reviewing Xbox games. That's not professional nor ethical. If all were like that, the score would be below 70, with some of them submitting the same score (6/10) twice like EG. It's not the same saying "This game sucks" on a forum than submitting that to Metacritic because of your agenda. It's not a question of brand pride or anything, it affect the developers that they choose to punish unfairly because of "lack of innovation and surprise". All games and developers deserve the same treatment.

So about the same scores as Stellar Blade and Ghost of Tsushima, which are both great. Yeah, 81 is nice.

@Banjo- but that also works both ways such as when multiple versions of IGN rate a game higher. You can't just complain when it doesnt go your way.

I was expecting 80-85 and its currrently sitting at 80 which is a perfectly good score, so the game has done well. No need to tarnish the success with conspiracy theories about review taxes

So I take it PJ O'Reilly can keep his job after people here wanted him sacked for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 review?

@ButterySmooth30FPS PJ Didn't write the review for Indiana...

edit You edited your comment and made me look like a crazy person 😅

@Ilyn I was expecting 80-85 and its currently sitting at 80 which is a perfectly good score, so the game has done well.

Yeah, not sure what people get so bent out of shape about. Having reviewed games for years myself in the past, it was always a problem with how a score is perceived. It's simple maths.

On a 0 - 10 scale, anything below 5 is below average to garbage, anything above 5 is above average to amazing. 8 (or in the case of Meta, 80) is a monster score.

7, 8, 9, and 10 are good, great, outstanding, or near perfect, respectively, for most review scores. People that assume anything below a 9 is a fail, are out of sync imo.

@Kaloudz avowed was never going to score highly. The devs have admitted it has jank. - reviewers won’t give that top marks - whereas a player is more likely to look past it.

But instead of just accepting 8 is a good score (and Infact right around other obsidian games) people try to make up excuses.

For me this 8 will be better than the 10 of Indy.

@PsBoxSwitchOwner Agreed. Don't get me wrong, some Xbox games deserve a good slap (looking at you Crackdown 3) but imo they've been riding a high for quite a while now, and I fully expect that to ride through the year - especially with DOOM.

I mean look at Blops 6 - widely regarded as a return to form. It sits at 83 on Meta.

Anyone who believes there's an Xbox tax is on Xbox crack

All this conspiracy-mongering about an 'Xbox tax,' when the reality is Obsidian has a long history of turning out decent but flawed WRPGs. The vast majority of their games sit in that 80 - 89 range, and that's been true since the seventh gen.

Obsidian just isn't a top tier developer. They're not getting Nintendo or Sony-tier scores because they're not a Nintendo or Sony-tier developer. Microsoft buying a company doesn't automatically make them more impressive than they were before, and it helps not to allow elevated expectations based on that alone.

@Ralizah Sony don't develop games. The studios they bought develop games.

@Ralizah So Ghost of Tsushima got similar review scores is it not “Sony-tier”?

Also think games like Pillars of Eternity 2 are definitely top-tier and not merely “decent”.

@Banjo- the Xbox store must be the worst review section ever when it comes to gamepass games 🤣😭 n ye I dont pay attention to reviews myself really as you get a load of 8 n 9s then some random chicks in a 4 like wtf 🤣🤣 I just have quick scan on games see what general scores are make sure they're not all 2/10 because games broken etc 🤣

Yeah man. Looks good! I don't really care if it's not groundbreaking or particularly deep. Casual good looking fun which isn't broken at launch. Sold!

@Ralizah They're not getting Nintendo or Sony-tier scores because they're not a Nintendo or Sony-tier developer. Microsoft buying a company doesn't automatically make them more impressive than they were before, and it helps not to allow elevated expectations based on that alone.

Yeah that makes no sense. Sony-tier? Sony have released plenty of games that have the same score charting (Ghost) and less (Concord).

The arguement that studios don't become more talented once acquired is true. Obsidian were impressive before and they remain impressive now. Their output alone is very commendable, and they're not afraid to take chances and try something new - and it almost always pays off.

80-90 is roughly where MS first party games sit. New and old. They're very, very good scores. Like I said above, the notion that anything less than a 9 equates to garbage is nonsensical. It's a habit the gaming community really needs to shove off.

@Kaloudz Yeah, I could've worded that better. Most Nintendo games actually land square in the 80s as well. I was thinking of an earlier comment mentioning Spiderman 2 and TotK.

I'll reword it: Insomniac has never been an incredible developer, and games like Avowed scoring in the low 80s/high 70s (where it'll likely settle for both versions once the reviews all pour in) has nothing to do with an imagined "Xbox tax" and everything to do with their products being decent-to-good, but not amazing, like games from Nintendo and Sony's top teams. Which was never an issue for people before Microsoft acquired them and direct comparisons started being made.

@Ralizah has nothing to do with an imagined "Xbox tax" and everything to do with their products being decent-to-good

That, I can totally get behind. See, while I don't believe Xbox-tax exists. I do firmly believe that there's some daft stigma that circulates the internet that it's somehow cool to auto-bash on Xbox. They've become the console equivalent to EA, or Nickelback.

It'll shake off when next-gen comes about I imagine, but do I believe outlets score poorly for views alone? Specifically for Xbox? No. Not entirely. The odd editor might, but there's not that many of them that it'd negatively shake up the landscape.

@Kaloudz I think Microsoft has severely damaged the Xbox brand image in gaming circles, for sure. I mean, even on here, a LOT of the commentary from the userbase is very negative.

But yeah, I don't think this game would be reviewed better if Sony had acquired them, for example. It's scoring in line with other Obsidian games (maybe on the lower end, but still in range). And Microsoft's stronger releases enjoy critical acclaim anyway.

@RBRTMNZ do you follow the other major publishers?

@Ralizah Totally agree. That's why I think next gen will be killer. Perhaps make or break but I do think MS will have this in the bag and at the very least claw back some lost consumers. But alas, we can only wait and see lol.

@IronMan30 Yes, I own all three consoles and a steam deck, plus I am just obsessed with gaming so I follow all the major publishers and the mid sized publishers and the obscure publishers.

@Jonnyfalcon I had the time today and I am petty so I decided to back my assertion up with data.

I looked at all the new games published by both Sony and Microsoft this generation where the game scored a meta rating of at least 80. Based on the data, Microsoft games are twice as likely to have outlier scores that fall more than 20% below the metascore. This data covers thousands of review scores so it is statistically significant.

My initial statement that Microsoft games receive a weird number of outlier low scores is correct and factually true.

@Ralizah for this generation Xbox games have a higher average review score the Sony published games. And that’s in spite Xbox games having twice as many weirdly low outlier scores that are way lower than the general consensus meta score.

Nintendo's development workforce is relatively small, considering their huge business in the industry and funds. They have increased the outsourced development significantly: Mercury Steam, Grezzo, Good-Feel, Bandai Namco, Intelligent Systems, HAL Laboratory... Even within Nintendo's internal studios, many of the geniuses are not involved in the active development anymore. Like Microsoft and Sony, Nintendo has bought studios like Canadian Next Level and Monolith Software, that was Namco's before. Actually, Monolith helped Nintendo developed Breath of the Wild. One of Nintendo's best developers is American. Thus, Nintendo's games being better because they're developed by Nintendo, if by Nintendo we mean Nintendo the Japanese and the geniuses that made Nintendo what it is today, does not make any sense and is not true.

Similarly, when people say that Sony's games are better, if by Sony we mean the studios that Sony has been acquiring around the world, that's subjective and questionable. Better in terms of graphics, sound, gameplay? We could discuss for hours. One thing is to prefer Nintendo, Sony or Xbox games, different thing is believing that your preferences become the unquestionable truth. That's arrogance and ignorance. There are better and worse games published by the three of them.

Furthermore, the score on Metacritic does not mean that games are better or worse, since some are overrated or underrated, with Xbox games being generally underrated compared to Sony's and Nintendo's, with examples like the other users have posted now and for years, or the one I posted above, Eurogamer submitting two 6s for Avowed with the following conclusions:

Avowed can be fun, but if you've finished even a few popular RPG titles, Obsidian Entertainment's new game won't surprise you with anything new (...) Obsidian has delivered an action RPG with a weak technical component, in which it doesn't do anything exactly new or epic.

Anyone can see that not delivering something that is "new", "surprising", "epic" and not "technically weak" has not prevented Nintendo and Sony games from being rated 10/10. This is just an example. If you check the well-received Xbox games, they have more surprisingly low scores aggregated, while Sony and Nintendo's games rarely get any negative input, even though not all gamers love them and some dislike them, naturally.

I wouldn't trust critic reviews on a game like this.

Game ends after main story, meaning weak or no endgame content. Not playing.

@Decimateh no worse than Google allowing bot review scores, so that P2W games with 9 out of 10 written reviews being 1-star (conformed after scrolling for miles and manually reviewing tens of thousands of written reviews) can somehow maintain 4.5-star or higher average.

@JaffeGaffe ye that stores just as messed up for reviews🤣🤣 Xbox isn't too bad tbh just sucks that of game goes to gamepass anyone can review bomb it without even playing it