Skyrim stealth archers and NCR Ranger wannabes rejoice: I’m 45 hours into Avowed’s hardest difficulty as a glass cannon gunslinger and I’ve loved every minute of it

Avowed might be one of the best wizard games around, with exciting, strange spells translated from Pillars of Eternity into a zoomed-in, action format. It’s hard to pass up stuff like Pull of Eora, a souped-up Mass Effect Singularity that yoinks enemies into an anti-gravity whirlpool. But I’ve been on a ranger kick lately, and something inside me yearned to be a pistol-slinging, Skyrim stealth archer-adjacent, Age of Sail NCR Ranger. At 45 hours and counting, I’m happy to report that not only is this playstyle viable in Avowed, it’s been fun as hell on the game’s max-out “Path of the Damned” difficulty.

Stealth is even less fleshed-out in Avowed than it is in The Elder Scrolls or 3D Fallouts, and I never found it feasible to quietly pick guys off from afar like in those games. It’s always nice to start a fight with extra sneak attack damage, but overall, an Avowed ranger build feels a bit like an Infiltrator from Mass Effect or a Nightstalker from Destiny, using an on-command invisibility power to get out of a hairy situation or line up extra damage.

Thankfully, the guns in Avowed feel amazing, and better still when dual wielding two pistols together. A low-level ranger ability makes time dilate when you charge up a power attack, and I get into this flow state with my flintlocks, charging up my next shot as the other pistol reloads, blasting away in slo-mo with my ammo never running out like some kind of early modern Chow Yun-fat. Even before finding any cool unique weapons or unlocking some of the crazier active abilities, being able to adopt this playstyle in a fantasy RPG made my heart sing.

I was worried that this would wind up getting boring, that I’d just be clicking on enemies’ heads before they could ever touch me while also missing out on Avowed’s more out-there abilities, but neither turned out to be true. Enemies in Avowed are surprisingly good at tracking you as you move, with melee attacks that close gaps and magnetize to you when, in other games, your foe would just be eating air as you slowly backpedal away. With no shield and minimal health and armor (gotta pump it all into damage), I felt like I was playing a movement FPS, dodging enemies and projectiles left and right to line up shots with my badass rad guns. This Skyrimmy RPG is hiding a great boomer shooter if you want to play it that way.

Meanwhile, Avowed’s fantastic unique weapons make up for missing out on its spells. Melee jock types start with flaming swords and only go up from there, while my faithful companion through the entire game has been a lightning pistol with a chance of spawning chain lightning on each kill. For a while, I was rocking dual pistols in one weapon slot with an arquebus in the other, taking advantage of a perk that auto-reloads holstered weapons to swap between them instead of waiting for reloads. I’ve since swapped my long gun for a bow that shoots out a weaker (but still deadly) chain lightning on every power attack, more than making up for my prior lack of AOE damage with spammed bolts ping-ponging between mobs, staggering them over and over as they try to get a word in edgewise.

I am also now joined by my new best friend, a spirit bear summoned through a late-game ranger tree ability. Summons in games can go one of two ways, but thankfully my ursine attendant is an absolute unit. If it’s possible to take him down before his timer runs out, I haven’t seen it happen, and he does beastly damage to boot.

So Avowed may be a wizard game first and foremost what with its wild spells and shockingly in-depth system of grimoires intertwined with ability tree upgrades, but if you’re like me and have that specific brain sickness that constantly demands playing as a sneaky sniper DPS edgelord type, Avowed’s got you more than covered.