Immortals of Aveum Review (Wytefang)
Immortals of Aveum is everything I personally hoped it would be. Graphically beautiful, exceptionally enjoyable gameplay, and a cool, well-written story with enjoyable scripting and fantastic voice-acting in a newly created IP that's quite interesting and very well-fleshed out..
While I am aware that some players seem to be having performance issues, that's not the case for me at all so far (which is confusing me, since I have good but not great and certainly not modern hardware). I have an i8 Coffee-lake Intel CPU, 32 GB of DD4 RAM, a fast M2 SSD, and an Nvidia 1080 TI with 12 GB of RAM and superclocked out of the box.
I was pretty nervous after checking out the Graphic settings because the game offers a really cool and informative (and innovative) tool called the performance budget which seemed to indicate I might have some issues with performance due to my system. Basically it removes some of the difficulties for the less technically savvy gamers when tweaking graphical settings by providing a colored number (gold numbers are the cost-hit to your CPU budget and blue numbers represent the hit to your videocard budget) after each line item. So for example, the Performance Budget Tool showed that I had 475 pts to spend towards my videocard budget but only 188 for my CPU budget. If I look at the setting for Shadow Quality, for example, it might show that on LOW it costs me 20 against my videocard budget but only 10 towards my CPU budget. But if I adjust that to HIGH setting, it may then show me that it'll cost me 40 against my videocard budget and now 20 towards my CPU budget. In this way, a person who may not quite fully understand what any particular setting means, can still tweak and adjust to their heart's content to get the performance numbers they feel comfortable with. I was able to have high textures but not much else, before maxing out my videocard budget (though I never quite hit the full total, thankfully) while running the game at 2K settings (2560x1440). However, I was quite nervous about my CPU as I was 2 points over the given CPU budget that the game had set for me, based on my CPU.
But once I fired up the game, I had smooth frames, fast gameplay and no issues - not even in the intro city-prologue portion of the game.
I'm a bit mystified how these other PC players are running into so much trouble with far better hardware. My hunch is that most PC gamers simply don't really dive into their settings much to tweak anything. Players griping on here about the game's performance may not have adjusted anything or used the cool Performance Budgeting too (I'll bet it's almost certainly the main issue). It's odd to buy something but not fully read the manual or learn how to properly use that particular thing you bought. But I see the same old performance gripes in nearly every new PC release. SMH
Gameplay-wise, this game feels amazing - responsive and enjoyable. Firing off your wide variety of spell types is extremely satisfying and I love how each spell color/type has its own unique feel and usage. Knowing how and when to use which spells and abilities is crucial to winning the more difficult fights I faced in this first part of the game and that's the hallmark of a truly enjoyable combat experience, imho. I love that the game has a loot system with a variety of rarities AND a cool skill tree.
Voice-acting is phenomenal and the music is excellent as well.
While the story isn't ground-breaking, necessarily, the setting itself and the overal IP feels fresh and interesting (to me, anyway). The characters have grown on me already which I didn't expect.
I haven't had to worry about unskippable cut-scenes (one the lame gripes I read in some other reviews here) because they're never THAT long and are so well done and either interesting or funny, or both that I never even thought to skip them.
While I can't say I've gone that far into the game, I see no reason why this level of quality and enjoyment won't continue on throughout the entire experience. So for my money, this is an exceptionally good game already. Highest possible recommendation.
And again, if you are intelligent enough to use the excellent and innovation Performance Budgeting Tool, you shouldn't have the issues some of these more technologically-challenged Steam gamers seem to be having. Adjust your game so it runs well. If my older system (my specs are posted above if you want to refresh your memory) can run it this smoothly while looking incredible, I might add (that was something I did not expect), then yours can too.
Enjoy!