Immortals of Aveum Review (Brillenbaerchen)
TL:DR: this one had a lot of potential, but making a good FPS is harder than you think. Questionable balancing and design choices bring this from "not great but alright" to "tedious and frustrating".
Short spoiler-free comment on the story: it's fine. No particularly new concept overall, okay delivery, it's fine (i. e. it's a shooter, don't overthink it).
For those of you who have issues with identity politics, give this a wide berth. The characters and interactions between them are harrowingly stupid most of the time, and the game bends over backwards to paint the usual suspects in the usual ways, it's old stuff by now, I won't go into detail. I myself didn't like it and it frequently jarred me out of the immersion, but I guess this aspect can be good or bad, depending on you as the player. Just consider yourself warned.
This is all semi-important, however, as it's a shooter, so bad story-telling and stupid characters kinda come with the territory, and everything hinges on the execution of the gameplay. And here this game drops the ball a few times.
The shooting mechanics themselves are fine, inferior to those of Destiny or Doom, but alright. Movement however, isn't. Everything feels somewhat hampered and sluggish all the time, even after unlocking several options, like a dodge-teleport, double-jump, hovering, grappling hook, and so on. There is not even an Auto-Sprint option, which is simply a clear-cut design error in any FPS game. Moving feels wrong, and slow, always.
The effect is worsened by literally EVERY enemy being able to do everything faster and better than you. Closing 50 meters in a second by jump-attacking you, hovering or even flying most of the time or always, teleporting from one end of the room to the other, dodging lightning quick several times in a row... I could go on.
This is omni-present even outside of combat, as the game fancies itself a FP Jump & Run as well, and frequently demands putting your inadecuate powers to the test in countless jumping puzzles or climbing exercises. It's somewhat of a reverse power fantasy, and it grates on your nerves pretty quick.
The other puzzles in the game are most of the time of the annoying "hit three switches within the time limit" variety, and the game expects you to back track all the time whenever you unlocked a new ability, because there's lots of puzzles and secrets you can't get to the first time around.
Whenever you unlock a new ability, the game floods you with situations where you need it, which also gets old quickly. No one spent any time thinking on why stuff would be anywhere and who would be able to get to it except EXACTLY you with your extremely specific and rare set of skills and abilities, so most puzzles don't feel like a believable part of the game world, but more like someone thought "wouldn't it be cool, if...". And it isn't, especially because of the over-use.
Enemy AI is valid for me, in the later parts of the game however I was regularly overwhelmed by having to do everything at once against a mixture of enemies that each are only susceptible to a very specific attack pattern - they mostly work well together (i. e. you're being long-range harassed while close-combat enemies keep you occupied), but the effect of all the "use this gimmick against this enemy and that gimmick against that enemy" design is then just you running in circles for a long time, taking pot shots until every enemy is finally dead. Not satisfying in any way.
Enemies rather quickly become HP sponges, while you yourself always ever take 3 to 5 hits to go down, same with your shield vs. their shields, and using your special fury attacks usually leaves you open far too long for their meagre damage output. Again, reverse power fantasy.
Balancing is a difficult issue in any game, so you can feel more powerful while still facing a challenge later in the game. Here you just never feel like there is any actual progress (e. g., when you get a permant HP upgrade but everything hits you proportionally harder, did you actually get more HP?).
You can eke out an advantage here or there by tweaking your skills, which was much appreciated by me, but in the end it did not keep combat from not being fun - and in the end combat is what a shooter is all about, so I can't recommend this.