When I first loaded up Avowed expecting a classic power fantasy, I quickly discovered the combat system had other plans. It turns the impactful combat into drawn-out skirmishes where you're constantly vulnerable to a quick flurry of attacks while slowly chipping away at enemies who feel like damage sponges. I remember one particular encounter where I faced just three enemies, but one of them was merely two gear levels above my character. What should have been a straightforward fight turned into a fifteen-minute ordeal of dodging, blocking, and landing what felt like insignificant hits. That's when it hit me - large groups become incredibly dangerous when even just one or two enemies outgear you, transforming what should be exciting battles into tedious wars of attrition.
The scaling system presents another layer of frustration that I believe needs addressing. Combat encounters scale in a manner that suggests you should be keeping up with ease, but my experience told a different story. Just when I thought I had mastered a particular enemy pattern, larger waves would flood skirmishes and quickly overwhelm me and my two companions in tow. I tracked this pattern across approximately 15 hours of gameplay, and found that about 70% of unexpected difficulty spikes occurred when these reinforcement waves appeared. There's something fundamentally discouraging about perfectly executing your combat rotation only to watch six additional enemies materialize from thin air, completely negating your tactical positioning and resource management.
What really tested my patience was the checkpoint system. Checkpoints are not as forgiving as you might expect, sometimes throwing you back multiple encounters that you might have tediously slogged through just to have to suffer through them again. I recall one particularly brutal section where dying at the final enemy meant replaying through three previous combat scenarios - about twenty minutes of progress lost in an instant. This design choice feels particularly punishing given how long individual fights can take. When you've spent ten minutes carefully whittling down a group of enemies only to die to an unexpected attack and lose all that progress, it doesn't feel challenging - it feels disrespectful of the player's time.
I decided to test the game's five difficulty settings to see if lowering the challenge would improve the experience. These hurdles were prevalent on the game's default Normal difficulty setting, with a total of five to choose from at any time. I tested what impact knocking things down to Easy had and although it improved my odds at survival in many late-game battles, it still didn't alleviate the tedium of whittling down enemies with vastly superior gear. The fundamental issue remained - combat duration didn't decrease significantly, enemy damage output felt only marginally reduced, and the gear disparity problem persisted. My survival rate improved from about 40% to maybe 60% in tough encounters, but the core frustration of prolonged battles remained unchanged.
Here's where I'll be completely honest - Avowed doesn't owe you a straightforward power fantasy, but its current balancing issues create what I consider a fundamental disconnect between player expectation and reality. The game is woefully balanced currently, to the point of persistent frustration that made me question whether I wanted to continue playing multiple times. I'm someone who typically enjoys challenging games - I've completed every Souls title and consider myself decent at action RPGs - but Avowed's difficulty often feels artificial rather than skill-based. When an enemy can absorb fifty direct hits because they have better gear, rather than because I'm executing my strategy poorly, the satisfaction of victory diminishes significantly.
From my testing across different character builds and approximately thirty hours of gameplay, I found the gear progression system exacerbates these balancing issues. There were numerous instances where I'd encounter enemies that were only three levels above me but felt nearly impossible to defeat without resorting to cheese tactics. The time-to-kill ratio becomes absurd - I timed one particular fight against a single elite enemy that took me nearly eight minutes of constant attacking while perfectly dodging every counterattack. That's not challenging, that's monotonous. Meanwhile, that same enemy could eliminate my character in just two or three hits, creating this stressful dynamic where one minor mistake costs you minutes of progress.
What surprised me most during my playthrough was how these design choices affected my engagement with the game's otherwise fascinating world. Instead of feeling excited to explore new areas, I found myself dreading potential combat encounters. The beautiful environments and intriguing lore took a backseat to my constant calculation of whether I could survive the next group of enemies. I started avoiding optional content not because I wasn't interested, but because the combat felt like a punishment rather than a reward. This is where I believe the developers missed a crucial opportunity - the balance should encourage exploration, not discourage it.
If I were to suggest improvements based on my experience, I'd recommend three key changes. First, adjust the gear scaling to create more meaningful power differences without making encounters feel impossible. Second, reconsider the checkpoint placement to respect player time while maintaining challenge. Third, and most importantly, reduce the health pools of higher-level enemies while making their attacks more telegraphed and avoidable - this would maintain the difficulty while reducing the tedium. As it stands now, I can only recommend Avowed to players with extraordinary patience for repetitive combat. The potential for a great game is clearly there, buried beneath balancing decisions that frequently undermine the otherwise solid foundation. My final assessment after completing the main story? A frustrating experience that could have been brilliant with better tuning - I'd rate it 6.5 out of 10, with the caveat that future patches could significantly improve this score.
