Immortals Of Aveum: A surprisingly fun shooter cursed with one of gaming’s all-time obnoxious heroes
If you want to get to the fun hiding at the core of Immortals Of Aveum, you're going to have to get through a whole lot of Jak
Games Features Immortals of Aveum
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Immortals Of Aveum makes a terrible first impression—and not just because it has a name that slides out of your brain the first second you take your eyes off of it. For whatever reason—and despite actually being pretty fun, once it figures out how to get out of its own way—EA’s new magically tinged first-person shooter (speller?) opens with a horrible misstep: A lengthy, action-light introduction to its world that puts its focus on the game’s writing, acting, and character. Which wouldn’t be nearly so damning, in a game whose writing, acting, and characters were less aggressively obnoxious than the ones populating Immortals Of Aveum. That goes double, maybe even triple, for your protagonist, Jak: Played with infinite smirk by Never Have I Ever’s Darren Barnet, Jak’s endless string of sarcastic quips, asinine banter, and cocky one-liners are the game’s single biggest barrier to entry—which is a shame, because there’s an enjoyable, if somewhat mindless, FPS experience here, buried beneath those initial mountains of snark.
Set in a magical world where Capital Letter Nouns battle it out for supremacy in the never-ending Everwar (you’re welcome for the new “red leather, yellow leather,” warm-up-needing vocal actors), Immortals is the product of new developer Ascendant Studios, whose ranks includes alumni of the Call Of Duty games. At first—and, again, it’s bad first impressions all around, here—you’d be excused for thinking the studio had just cranked out another military shooter with a little bit of arcane window dressing, with “rifle,” “shotgun,” and “submachine gun” replaced by “blue spell,” “red spell,” and “green spell,” respectively. (The early enemies who do nothing but pelt you at a distance while you fire back at them from across the battlefield do very little to disabuse you of that notion.) It’s only after an hour or two that Immortals lets you start tinkering with your arsenal, expand out your abilities, and deliver something much closer to expressive play, at which point it reveals itself to be a breezy, enjoyable blend of first-person platformer, run-and-gun shooter, and exploration-based adventure game that is, surprise of surprises, actually pretty damn fun.
Heck, the plot even starts to get kind of neat, even if it’s continually hamstrung by the charisma-free deadweight it’s being delivered to. (At the very least, hearing magical communists and magical fascists have an argument about who’s doing more to kill the world at the present moment is a more thoughtful conversation than we were expecting to encournter here.) And once it lets you actually play it, that play is smooth as hell, giving the player plenty of abilities to both deal out and avoid damage, and filling the levels with enemies that force you to mix up your tactics regularly. Sure, we groaned audibly the first time we opened a chest and saw a piece of equipment with a level attached to it pop out of it, but Immortals is actually pretty smart about its upgrade paths, using loot, experience points, and piles of gold as good incentives to get you to poke at the nooks and crannies of its beautiful, colorful world.
Immortals Of Aveum’s greatest triumph might simply be one of timing, though: With September of 2023 gearing up to be one of gaming’s heaviest months in recent memory—filled with Armored Core, Starfield, Baldur’s Gate, and more—there’s something very refreshing about having a brightly colored, enjoyable world to breeze your way through, minimal investment required. It’s a pity your co-pilot on this little day trip is, y’know, Jak, but it’s still a surprisingly enjoyable palate cleanser, before the serious stuff arrives.
14 Comments
Hmmm… All-time worst video game protagonist? I’ll go with Grayson Hunt from Bulletstorm. He’s basically an amalgamation of every mid-aughts aggro, d-bag performative masculinity stereotype rolled into one. Like if Marcus Fenix thought that “go s*ck a d*ck” is a end-all-and-be-all of insults and retorts.
Bulletstorm is actually subversive and a biting satire of toxic masculinity in gaming duh
Go sock a duck? Why, I never!
But he was offset by Triska Novak, who had some of the best rants and was voiced by Jennifer Hale.
The only way to make it better would be to toss in JK Simmons in a Cave Johnson cameo.
Aiden Pearce, I rest my case
Jason Brodie, or whatever that cunt from Far Cry 3 was called.
I was coming here to mention Aiden! I didn’t even play ‘Watch Dogs’, I just watched a friend play it, and I still wanted to strangle that fucker.
This isn’t fucking Kotaku, you can say “go suck a dick” here. You censoring yourself just makes it sound like you think the act of sucking dick is offensive.
Honestly, this game looks dope as hell, but I’ll wait for a sale. BG3 console release is around the corner, plus Spider-Man 2, plus Cyberpunk DLC, and hahahaha I have time for NONE of these but I like to pretend I’m still a capital-g Gamer.
I’ve finished Tears of the Kingdom. Hell of a sequence leading up to the ending. Nice to have some numbers in the quest menu now to give me a sense of how much I missed. I’m gonna take some solid time off from the game and settle into something else before coming back to pick away at any remaining quests. I’m definitely not getting all korok seeds, probably not filling out the compendium, but there are at least a few places of interest that I’m curious about.Now I’m just in this in-between-games mode, where my sleep schedule’s still ruined from the “just one more quest” hours I was keeping, but I haven’t quite picked up Hades or Persona 4 or We <3 Katamari Reroll, or whatever else comes next. Which makes it a good time to dink around in the Orb of Creation beta that just dropped last week. I don’t think my renewed fascination with the game will survive the weekend, but this game has a way of making two different numbers going up feel very different from one another, and Marple’s rebuilding of the systems that govern unlocks has made it unfamiliar enough to hold my attention, at least made me curious what rituals are going to look like when open up that last missing aspect of the game.And with the backlog of games hitting a nice, low, round number like 10, and with my geeky social life picking up, I may be shifting into a much more tabletop-centered gaming mode. Last weekend, my friend who moved down here several months ahead of me introduced me to her game group. I learned six new games (Everdell Farshore, Euphoria, Deep Dive, No Thanks!, Jump Drive, and Underwater Cities), and it reminded me that I needed to hit up my co-worker from a decade ago who’s just getting into board games so I can expose him to the lighter end of my collection and see how deep he wants to go.This weekend I’m going with my friend to check out a board game shop where they do playtesting, and I still need to hit up my nephew to see if he’s available for a Tabletop Sim session or even face-to-face games now that I’m 300 miles closer to him than I was two months ago. I’ve invested a lot of money and space into these games, and now I’m in an area and an era where I can get a lot more use out of them than just playing the solo variants and sharing pictures of my 192 Everdell meeples. I’m back in civilization, and there’s a much larger pool of people in which to find people who are really into niche interests. New job, new apartment, new me, and all that.
cool
Sorry I may have missed it but what platform (s) is(are) this for?
AEW Fight Forever just got its first big content update, specifically Stadium Stampede mode, which is an online battle royal thing where you run around a stadium picking up weapons and power-ups and trying to be the last one standing. I think a lot of people would have preferred more CAW options or wrestlers, and there’s still some glitchiness, but taken on its own Stampede is messy fun- you get to do all kinds of goofy stuff, from firing T-shirt cannons at people to riding horses and running people down with carts. It is an online multiplayer thing and the game didn’t very sell very well, so while I didn’t have a lot of trouble getting into matches on patch day who knows how long it’ll last. (There’s also a slight problem with the endgame, it has one of those shrinking safety circle things, but that circle eventually disappears entirely so matches do sometimes end with everyone just trying to outlast each other and chugging energy drinks to win via attrition.) I hope to see at least one patch with some new CAW options.Also caught up on the summer activities for Final Fantasy XIV, which yields a nice set of sentai-looking armor (and a stage you can pose on where multicolored pyro regularly goes off!) Rising’s coming up quickly.
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