Avowed has the best combat out of all of these games ( I haven't played KC2 yet but if the combat isn't much better than KC1 it still loses to Avowed)
The reason it flopped is totally unrelated to the actual gameplay or story or writing. I don't think it was marketed well at all and the default character presets being fucking hideous didn't help and probably scared a lot of people off. The game is probably like a 7/10 and is definitely better than skyrim or oblivion on pretty much every metric besides being able to move bread around and killing random NPC's that aren't important to the story.