Immortals of Aveum Review (Dubious Muldoon)
This is probably the most conflicted I’ve felt about a game in a long time. I know the game is supposed to be between 15-20 hours long, but I’ve played as much as I could before it started annoying the shit out of me. There is some stuff that I really like here, but sadly the bad just ends up outweighing the good.
Pros:
+The gameplay is really fun (for the most part) and they really nailed a lot of the big set piece moments that a game claiming to be “COD with magic” should have.
+You get to go around and explore a lot more than I expected. The movement and puzzles you can find around the environment are a ton of fun and the platforming wayshrines or whatever they’re called were really cool ways to get upgrades.
+I personally really dug the visual style/aesthetic of the world and loved the combination of technology and magic. It helped the game world feel a lot more unique than just a standard fantasy setting.
+Speaking of the setting, the lore and notes that I found scattered around were probably the most interesting part of the game as far as the story went. They were interesting and were far and away the best written things in the game…
Cons:
-…Which is because the plot and characters are absolute garbage! Every character talks and acts like an obnoxious, Z-grade MCU knockoff who is more concerned with desperately trying to be funny than anything else. Jak (our main character) is one of the worst offenders here and I honestly would have preferred a stock, silent Call of Duty protagonist to the whiny, annoying idiot we got stuck with here.
-This isn’t helped by the plot being absurdly predictable. It feels like it’s following the generic fantasy/sci-fi YA story template word for word and you’ll be able to call every plot twist and story beat if you've got even a 3rd Grade reading level.
-The worst part about all this is that one of the lead writers is Michael Kirkbride! The man who wrote Morrowind, who wrote C0DA and the Song of Pelinal, who made The Elder Scrolls Lore interesting, is one of the lead writers on this trash!? I refuse to believe it. He has such a distinct style and voice as a writer and not a single thing here except for maybe a few lore concepts match that in the slightest. Either he was mandated by corporate to write like a bottom-tier Marvel clone or he phoned it in harder than Bethesda did when they wrote the story for Starfield.
-The gameplay was also beginning to get more annoying the further I went on, with more and more of the enemies I faced being damage sponges. I was playing on normal difficulty and wasn’t having a hard time with the game, but the fights just started to take way too long because of how much health every enemy had. It killed the pacing of the game for me.
-Also, I have no idea why there’s a skill tree or gear system in this game. Most of the skills are just passive, percent-based buffs while the gear is just slight upgrades that mostly look the same. They just seem like needless features that were tacked on at the last minute.
-Finally, the game is (or at least was) horribly optimized when I played it. I would get random stuttering and frame drops for no reason while walking in a slightly open area, but it would run fine and without any issues during the big scripted battles. I assume they patched at least some of this over time but I have no idea how much better it is now compared to at launch.
I might go back and finish this one day, but as of right now I’m done. Immortals of Aveum is a generic and forgettable game that could have and should have been better given the talent, technology and ideas behind it. I know that the studio behind this had to layoff a ton of people due to the game not selling well, but I do hope they get a chance to make a second game. Not a sequel to this, but something that lets the dev team really show off what they can do. There’s clearly passion on display here and going off the previous work of the people at Ascendant, they could go on to make something truly special. But looking at Immortals of Aveum by itself, I know for a fact that they could do a lot better than this.