[Console games] Immortals Of Aveum Review - Run And Gun

[FRIDAY THE 13]

 

Your considerations don't just end at what color magic you're using, either, as you're outfitted with several arcane tools and powerful special spells that serve their own purposes. Those include a piercing red laser that can disrupt enemy spellcasters from using magic, an explosive wave of cascading rocks that breaks shields, floating lipids that latch onto and slow down fast-moving targets, and a shield that blocks incoming fire. All of these--and more--have their own cooldowns, and most you need to manually switch to in order to use while the rest require you to recharge them with the consumption of an item. It's a lot to keep track of and switch between, especially on a gamepad controller. My entire playthrough on PlayStation 5 left me wishing I was playing the game on PC, where presumably all of these tools and abilities are mapped to individual keys on a keyboard.

Enemy design doesn't encourage you to play all that strategically beyond color-coded combos. Melee-focused enemies pursue you with reckless abandon, incentivizing you to pick them off from a distance before they close in. Meanwhile, spellcasters and archers dart about on the outskirts, dancing out of view and blasting you from your blindspots, encouraging you to find ways of bringing them in close to then blast them away. Despite these differing approaches, however, all enemies are dealt with in the same way: shooting them with their matching color. All of the strategy in Immortals is tied to matching the right color to the right enemy, lessening the importance of positioning, cover, movement, and other skills typically rewarded in shooters.

If a massive, punching creature is running towards me in red armor, for example, it doesn't matter if I try to carefully position myself where they can't reach me and snipe at them from afar with my long-range blue magic. Their armor is red--I have to wait for them to close on me to use the shotgun-like red magic to break that armor. My ability to strategize and try to overcome an enemy's weaknesses are often dashed in the face of whatever armor an enemy is using.

 

This is exacerbated by the environments, which are visually distinct but largely designed as big, open spaces with several raised platforms on the outskirts and a few columns of cover scattered throughout. Sometimes there's a bottomless pit or two you have to double-jump over for a little extra flavor. But every battle quickly begins to feel the same, the only difference being that more enemies are being added later, which results in the aforementioned feeling of being overwhelmed, not necessarily challenged. It feels especially telling that Immortals' idea of a difficulty curve is to introduce a tough miniboss early on and then have you later face the exact same miniboss but with other enemies fighting you too, and then again you face two of that same miniboss and some other enemies, and then finally you face an extra large version of the miniboss with a giant health bar while smaller enemies distract you on the side. The challenge is evolving, yes, but only in terms of the number of times you have to switch what color magic you're using.

And granted, this type of increasing challenge is typical for most shooters, where you're expected to better strategize and master your weaponry over time to deal with the increasing number of threats. Immortals' difficulty isn't as rewarding to overcome, however, because the untenable task of weapon switching is constrained in an unfair way. Within the frantic whirlwind of Immortals' heated combat, keeping on top of everything that you need in order to progress through a fight is oftentimes frustrating. I appreciate the almost puzzle-like nature that Immortals is presumably striving for, where getting through a firefight isn't solely dependent on how well you shoot but also on figuring out what you need to use and in what order. And in the early hours of the game, this formula works quite well. It's only later, when Immortals' idea of combat difficulty is reduced to the simple idea of just throwing more enemies with larger health bars at the player, that this concept falls apart. The sheer number of variables to keep track of while splitting your fire between several quick-moving bullet sponges is overwhelming, regularly leading to irritating deaths that forced me to put down the game and cool off for a few hours before trying again. And, again, I suspect this shortcoming is less severe on a PC with a mouse and keyboard but having only played on consoles, I can't say for sure either way. It all just feels like you're bashing your head against the same wall and only losing because you're unable to switch between all your weapons quickly enough to put enough damage into everything fast enough.

 

Unfortunately, the environmental element of Immortals has both poor gameplay and narrative payoffs. To cleanse the world, you just do more shooting and killing--Jak can rip away more magic from the world to fuel his spells to then battle against the deadly sentient miasma that's consuming the world, knowing that this miasma is created whenever magic is being taken from the world. It's a tantalizingly complex dilemma that Immortals just refuses to delve into after setting it up.

And even though he's positioned as the voice of reason and a revolutionary in how he thinks about the war, Jak's wisdom is dashed halfway through the story with him making a bizarre decision that goes against much of his character development up to that point. When presented with an easy way of ending the conflict and sundering both sides' incessant need to control magic, Jak opts to...not make that choice. In fact, he does the exact opposite--a costly mistake that feels uncharacteristic of his seemingly intelligent grasp of the morality of the situation. As a result, you spend most of the latter half of the story striving to make amends for this bad call, but it just reinforces how badly Jak screwed up and how odd that he didn't recognize the clear hypocrisy in his actions that resulted in more war. It pushes him away from being a likable protagonist to being an oddly written and ultimately despicable one. And it's hard to play as someone you dislike. The whole thing feels less like character development and more like a way to strangely justify there being a second half of the story and making the whole experience twice as long as it probably needed to be.

Immortals of Aveum stops just short of fully complementing its traditional military shooter story with an engaging environmentalist message, instead opting to primarily use those narrative themes to inform the world design and lore. It leaves the overall story feeling half-baked, further highlighting the uncharacteristic actions of its unlikable protagonist. The actual shooting fares a bit better, especially in the first half, when combat is more like a color-coded puzzle. But it, too, falls short--the repeated use of enemies and arena layouts make for repetitive firefights and the sheer number of combat options is difficult to navigate when combat reaches an overwhelming fervor. I enjoyed small pieces of Immortals of Aveum, but not enough to strongly recommend.

 

LINK : https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/immortals-of-aveum-review-run-and-gun/1900-6418107/

Edited September 22, 2023 by [Ty]M@g0k1l3r
T/C.