Recent reviews by Honk

Very stylish and smooth game-play. Balancing isn't too difficult for one player to complete solo but challenging enough that the co-op element benefits greatly.

Also, Faraday who? HEMLOCK IS ON TOP

Gorgeous sights, great music and so far an intriguing story with amicable companions. Exploration is abundant and rewarding. Otherwise:

You can expect similar levels of mechanical depth and similar immersion to The Outer Worlds, which you know is not much if you played that game. Combat encounters are infrequent and short enough to leave me wanting more just to play around with new spells, abilities, and synergies as I unlock and discover them.

Lastly:
1) The game lacks the incitement of a very strong emotion games like Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Shadowrun, Baldurs Gate 3, and Divinity 2 have been able to create. The festering apprehension where developing events and writing would create those "oh ♥♥♥♥ what's about to happen" or "OH ♥♥♥♥ that just happened!?" moments were I felt a decision could/did cause/caused the collapse/maintenance of the house of cards above me and people I care about or people I was trying to help.

2) Similarly, the game has lacked any build-up and hype surrounding what I would've hoped to have been epic or tragic combat encounters. Act 2's beginning Arasaka Tower attack. Fighting a certain two mages in White March 1 and 2. Damn near every boss encounter in Baldur's Gate 3. That re-occurring ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in Divinity 2. These things locked ME IN.

I looked forward to Avowed, but similarly to Starfield I tempered my expectations. If I had to be reductive, I'd say Avowed is an "okay" game, and that's okay.

Edit: I agree with PropheticEvent's perspectives, except for what they've said about dialogue choices. Some but not all choices I've made (and saved/reloaded to test) result in starkly different (and sometimes "hidden") outcomes. What the payoff of those outcomes are remains to be seen. I also agree with Lucky's and Otter's perspective.

Great music, great game-play, surprising amounts of attention to detail and build planning. You could easily go search up a build guide or spend hours experimenting and tweaking your own.

There are some bugs, but more importantly there are stability and performance issues. For a game of this size and graphical fidelity I don't understand the ass bad performance issues but here's to hoping it gets fixed.

Good music, good environments, fun combat (very subjective among my friend group). The enemy NPC behavior is not advanced but their attack patterns, damage, and numbers often pose enough of a challenge. Writing isn't particularly strong but served a sufficient vehicle for my interest in completing quests. Looking forward to the sequel.

Tragic horror game where everyone involved is a victim. The camera angles, facial expressions, and lighting used to convey mood and invoke emotions throughout various scenes work perfectly. This really is a tragic game that the developers mention contain stories that they experienced or heard about. If you've watched many crime documentaries, you're likely to be familiar with several of the game's themes. I watched a play-through and wanted to give the developers their proper due with this purchase and review.

Watched manlybadasshero play this, and thumbing up his video does not show enough support to the people that made this happen, so I want to engage by buying the game and leaving a review.

Great voice acting. Great soundtrack, and every track is great and mood and scene appropriate. Tense, emotional, and tragic game from start to finish. The game-play itself isn't riveting, but it also much easier to digest if you absorb the mechanics piece-by-piece and take your time (no pun intended).

$1.99 to edit your character appearance in a single-player game after spending $80.00. Your character appearance is on their servers so deleting your save files from \STEAM\userdata\NUMBER\2054970\remote\win64_save and making edits within the character creator, even with Cloud saves off, does not apply to your in-game character.

Fun, tense, good replay value.

My only cons against this game are that some skills and mechanics are extremely ambiguous or don't function as literally described, and there are some bugs that I experienced during my first play-through that resulted in very annoying and unwanted outcomes (I opted against reloading saves during these outcomes).

Every other aspect of this game (I literally mean that) is well-thought, well-designed, and well-executed. Everything. One of my most favorites of all time.

Like many others, I have a very high-end rig. They ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the performance on this. Don't buy this thinking you will be different and that these are isolated issues. This is an issue across all platforms.

Edit: As a comment below pointed out (as well as a visit to Virtuos Games' web page), this blemish of a product is the fault of Virtuos Games and not Obsidian.