All views are that of the author and are not influenced by any copies of games provided by publishers for review purposes. Immortals of Aveum is available on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and PC on EA App, Steam and Epic Game Store.
About the Game:
Immortals of Aveum introduces us to a world without guns; but that doesn’t stop magic from taking up the same role. It’s the first Ascendant Studios game through EA’s originals program, which has had mixed success in the past but has given us stuff like It Takes Two and Unravel. It’s a first-person shooter, for lack of a better term – with the fantasy trappings of magic rendering this feeling something like a magical Call of Duty. Fantasy fans will find themselves right at home in this lore-rich world; which spends the first hour catching you up to speed on the mythology of its characters for something that will take around 25 hours to complete: if you wanted a nice calm before the September storm, Immortals of Aveum is that game, suffering from the unfortunate release of being buried right when publishers are gearing up for bigger titles; as there’s quite some fun to be had here.
The game introduces you to Jak, a happy, go-lucky thief – think The Lies of Locke Lamora – but his world is quickly upended when the everwar robs him of his home and he gains the power needed to join the elite order of battlemages to save the world. It’s a war fought throughout the multiverse but this isn’t a multiverse restricted to cameos: this is full on chaos mode; with two sides of the opposing war fighting early on in a conflict that dictates the ability to simply remove all rivers in a territory from existence.
Once you get to the flashforward after a grimdark intro; Immortals of Aveum shifts gears. Those familiar with Forspoken will recognise the quippier-than-quip style dialogue; which can sound grating – but attention to detail in the world and the game’s belief in its systems are what sells it. This is a fun, richly drawn game that makes use of Unreal Engine 5 to seamlessly transition between cut scene and gameplay: and there’s a lot of dialogue to be had. You play as a Triarch, a Magnus – only more enhanced; capable of wielding a wide variety of spells that take the form of a colour wheel. It wouldn’t be an original fantasy game without tons of proper nouns and the idea of a Chosen One protagonist, wouldn’t it? SyFy fans will find themselves right at home here – but all the same; I was drawn into this world – which creates a ripe playground to explore – feeling very movie-like in energy; but the budget required to effectively turn this into a film in a way that’s done justice would be hard to ignore.
Gameplay:
The gameplay is unfortunately not unique enough to separate it from pretty much every other game out there of its ilk; but it’s tons of fun at staying within the formula. There’s a crafting wheel of course; you can get upgrades and unlock weapons with ease – the formula is familiar because you’ve seen it deployed before.
The combat is rich; bombastic and insane – you can slow down your enemies to have more time to attack them one second; useful with bigger foes; and you can haul archers toward you where you blow them apart with the equivalent of a shotgun. It’s tense, action packed and rewarding as you decimate enemies with relative ease – the variety in the combat keeps things fresh, and the freedom of magic seems entertaining at first but you’re quickly pulled to a path where the game determines what weapons it wants you to use in what particular conflict.
It’s no surprise to see Call of Duty comparisons across the board – the fast paced conflict is bloody, brutal and chaos – just because there are no guns doesn’t mean that your weapons won’t feel like them; the skill with them is quick to learn; but difficult to master. It’s easy to go the route of slinging your enemies closer towards you so you can shotgun blast them in the face with red, chaos magic – but it’s more challenging to hurl blue magic at them – offensive; long-range like an accurate rifle shaped like Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber. Different magic can be used throughout the game and you gain new powers as it progresses; the ability to purge the ground of dangerous enemies comes next to the ability to fly – not as useful as you think but a good way to escape in a sticky situation.
Enemy sizes vary; but are no more different than your typical open world game. The brutes; the footsoldiers; etc – the classes are very generic but you’ll have so much fun blasting them apart and it never feels dull or boring thanks to Immortals of Aveum’s madcap energy, which is the most important thing for a game that builds itself on magical gunplay – or that should be magical spellplay. Fantasy nonsense is in full effect but you can ignore that and have a great time; those who balk at fantasy books when they introduce three made-up words in the first chapter will run for the hills here; but if you take up the summer blockbuster-like narrative with the approach that you would a summer blockbuster; it’s fun and easy to enjoy.
In addition to this; there’s environmental puzzles that you’ll need to solve. They aren’t difficult and change up the pace; serving primarily as a breather before the chaos. The focus is on the action first and foremost.
Visuals:
The visuals are superb. Cranked high; there’s a vast array of them to play with on a PC – I played through this one in a PS5; so it looked appropriately gorgeous – stunning recreations of audience chambers; even the slums where our characters live looked beautiful, and the game runs very much like someone having fun in a fantasy world. It’s a blockbuster movie in game format; explosive to the core – the colours paint a vivid picture of chaos; and the platformer levels create a strong sense of depth. The textures are good and it’s easy to care about the characters as how full of depth their models are; take Jak for example, his design gives him an air of Nathan Drake to him with each of the characters having a plethora of tattoos that define their origin story.
The cutscenes are visually beautiful and transition seamlessly from one shot to the other. They’re cinematic compared to the gameplay; and benefit from good performances and a strong motion capture depicting their movement. Jak looks like Darren Barnet; who brings a degree of cinematic quality to the role – you’ll recognise him from Gran Turismo and Never Have I Ever. There’s a good cast here; Gina Torres of course is always fantastic and both Lily Cowles and Yvonne Senat Jones are good in their roles. For a game as reliant on its cinematics you’d expect them to be – and they deliver that half of the game just fine.
Sound:
The sound at play in Immortals of Aveum is worthy of the full chaos: the clash of conflict is intense; the magical spells sound distinctively at their most like guns here, something like lasers in a sci-fi movie. The dialogue is good; with strong voice performances – and the way the characters scream their lines at you captures the full on chaotic nature of the eternal war that’s on full show. Aubrey Hodges’ score kicks off with a triumphant opening theme and follows on from there – capturing the start of the adventure and then delivering appropriate chaos energy to match the theme of the game; which is – general chaos in full motion. That’s then followed up by music from Jamie K and Tom Hawk, who add a little of variety but consistency for the soundtrack that won’t set the world alight but gives the game what it needs.
Performance:
There were some glitches fixed mostly by a day one patch; but Immortals of Aveum otherwise runs smoothly – a few times when you’re in the lift I did notice the texture of the characters having noticeably a hard time capturing the face models against the dark background; but moments like this are few and far between thankfully. Nothing is gamebreaking and the performance of Immortals of Aveum is as you’d expect from a triple A, refreshingly not overwhelmed with bugs. For A PC, you can run it at the minimum requirements of RTX 2080 and Ryzen 5 3600; with the PS5 version running at 720p resolution at 60fps, which will drop when the game is pushed to its absolute limit – which can be quite frequently given the sheer amount of chaos on display. But you can’t fault Immortals of Aveum for its visual and performance ambition: if it had came out as a launch title for the PS5 as one of the game’s testers to show the audience what the console was capable of; you wouldn’t be surprised.
It pushes Unreal Engine 5 to its limits but the shadowy glitches do feel a touch overwhelming with low-res textures at times. For a game that takes up a lot of space on your PC; that’s a high demand considering its vast GPU requirements. Expect a benchmark similar to Crysis and you probably wouldn’t be far off – described as a Crysis-like game; that suits Immortals of Aveum down to the ground.
Accessibility:
There are plenty of accessibility options for Immortals of Aveum which you’ll get to know right from the start. Colour blind modes are by far the most that I’ve seen in a game from the start: accessibility for deuteranopia; protanopia and tritanopia exist. You can change the subtitles size significantly; and on top of that the controls are viewable at any time. Easy/hard difficulties are there and apply in the standard way; if anyone wants to experience what the story is like, easy mode – anything harder will give you more of a challenge. It’s billed as a single player, first person magic shooter and it lives up to the bill – no internet action is required.
Replayability:
I’ll be honest; the replayability in Immortals of Aveum will only be for you if you enjoy the story so much that you want to return to it; as it’s very linear and there’s not that much room for dialogue playthroughs and even customisation doesn’t give enough depth to warrant a second playthrough. There is currently no attempts at a new game plus; and no multiplayer content, that’s not to say there won’t be any in the future – but for now; this is looking like a one and done: and there’s not really anything wrong with that at all in some cases!
Conclusion:
Immortals of Aveum is a fun, bombastic Crysis-like game that has more at home with Call of Duty than anything else; all spells blazing. Nothing is new and its path is well trodden; but what you get is a fun exercise in the formula with stellar cinematics that give the story just the right amount of narrative heft that it needs to thrive. Expect something akin to a summer blockbuster movie – easily digestible; fun in the moment – but you’ll forget this after you’ve completed your playthrough. Hurt by its release coming right out before Starfield that won’t help matters as there are more attractive titles elsewhere; but for those who want to try something new – it’s worth waiting for in a sale.
Gameplay: 7/10
Visuals: 7/10
Sound: 7/10
Performance: 7/10
Replayability: 4/10
Verdict: 64/100
