Genuinely dreadful on nearly every aspect. Despite trying to "get my money's worth" from a stupid purchase of this game an hour before it was announced to headline April's PS+ offerings, I could not force myself through it.

Gameplay is vapid with barely any variety in level and enemy design, performance is god-awful despite being obviously upscaled with shimmery/muddy visuals, and the plot is unbearable with the worst protagonist I've ever been forced to play as. Every character is a Marvel-quipping smart-ass with ceaselessly annoying chatter and "jokes" that makes a lobotomy look attractive by comparison.

I got just over 40% according to my Playstation but I couldn't take it any longer, selling my copy and deleting this garbage off console storage for good.

I had a good time with Immortals of Aveum but the gameplay is extremely let down by the narrative and writing and it simply overstays its welcome.

I like the look of this game. There are a lot of flashy VFX flying around and the environments are beautiful and (though pretty generically fantasy) look impressive. Most of the enemy designs are surprisingly simple in a way that didn't really work for me though.

This is a first person shooter with the guns flavored like magic. Blue is your rifle, red is your shotgun, green is your smg. It all works really well and some color matching with enemy types makes it play a lot like Destiny. The movement is fun though not quite as kinetic as Doom 2018, I still enjoyed running around these arenas picking my targets and taking them apart.
Over the length of the game there really isn't enough introduced and I did get tired of the fights by the end. I didn't feel much compulsion to explore the open world after I had beaten the game.

This is a narrative heavy single player game and it really drops the ball here. The narrative is fairly generic though unnecessarily convoluted, with a couple of obvious twists and nonsensical motivation for most of the characters. Characters do things or refuse to do things obviously to further the plot, with no real attention paid to what that character's motivations might actually be.
Add to that writing that is like really badly done MCU dialog and this game becomes sort of a chore to get through. It isn't even that the characters are all annoying or intolerable (though some definitely are), the writing itself simply doesn't deliver, lacking the character and charm that, despite being vapid, MCU characters have.
There is a big swing at a lore heavy world here, but it is heavy handed and mostly ignorable. Characters drop 5-6 proper nouns on you per sentence, most of which are unimportant and just serve to remove your ability to understand what is even going on. Despite that, the world is pretty cool to just hang around in.

Immortals of Aveum needed to improve its focus and reign in the writing, but it is fun to play through despite that. If you want a fairly unique feeling first person shooter to blast through and you have already played both Doom games, it might be worth a shot.

Platinum #57

+Some fun ideas and the game world had some interesting potential.
+The 'gunplay' is solid.
-Suffers badly from 'MCU' style writing and humor that ultimately falls flat.
-Encounters in the later half of the game are extremely chaotic due to way too much happening with spell effects aka 'visual diarrhea'.

I originally abandoned this and didn't plan to go back to it, but eventually it occurred to me that I could just switch to easy mode for the bitchass fight that was making me rage out, and see what the rest of the game had to offer.

I had really high hopes going into this. It landed with no fanfare whatsoever and immediately disappeared beneath the wheels of the parade of once-in-a-generation releases this year. It looks really cool; the magic effects are bright and colorful, like fireworks. I figured in a stacked year like this it's like James Bond vs Godzilla; it doesn't matter how good you look in a tux when you're just gunk between a giant lizard's toes. I saw hidden gem potential and on balance I think it more or less delivered on this.

My first impression was quite good, as well. The characters are all memorable and likable, and the worldbuilding felt plausible and fleshed out without being cumbersome. The combat takes its cues from Doom 2016 and Eternal and all the pieces are in place for a really strong movement shooter.

I love the active shield mechanic. I think this is the most innovative and potentially impactful new idea I've seen in a shooter for a long time. The way it works is you can toggle your shield on and off. When it's on, you move slower (maybe like 60% speed?) but you don't take health damage. Health damage requires consumables to replenish and you can only carry a few at a time, so preventing it is a big deal. The shield has its own health, kinda like Halo's shield; if you take a few hits and turn off the shield, it will regenerate quickly. However if you keep the shield up long enough for it to lose all of its health, it will break, meaning it recharges quite slowly.

As you can imagine this quickly becomes a big part of combat. This isn't a cover shooter, and you're usually being flanked if not completely surrounded, so avoiding damage entirely just through movement is usually a losing battle. Knowing when to activate your shield and when to let it recharge is a really fun skill to build and knob to tweak your playstyle. You can pursue upgrades that add effects like damage or a knockback when the shield breaks that give you even more options.

Unfortunately, I found it hard to use the shield optimally. This is a game with a lot of buttons to juggle. It also has awful default controls that seem to depend on the player having two right thumbs, and does not offer any options for button remapping. I put two paddles on my Xbox Elite controller and this made things much more playable. It didn't solve the big problem, though, which is that there's just too many actions the player has to be constantly cycling through. I found the manual health and mana replenishment in particular to be a real chore. I remember a Diablo 3 dev once talking about how they wanted to give the player fewer, but more interesting choices. Manually clicking a button when my mana or health gets low may add tension and difficulty, but it's not interesting, and it distracts from the genuinely fun stuff like the shield and weapon swapping.

When I go full sweat mode and put on four paddles for high level Doom Eternal it's because I genuinely need all ten fingers for that experience. Every digit has a different, mission-critical tool for its flexible combat loop. The high complexity makes the game fill my brain like a gas, occupying every space; when it all comes together it's downright euphoric. Unfortunately, Immortals of Aveum gums up its toolset with chores. Manually sprinting, reloading and replenishing resources just slows everything down, and gives you really deflating ways to mess up (like dying with a bunch of unused health crystals).

I also had problems with the movement options. I found the blink teleport to be extremely unsatisfying. For one thing, the distance is laughably paltry. I kept waiting for an upgrade that never came. It's so short that in first person perspective, when everything close to you is off-camera so you have no easy frame of reference, it often looks like you're not moving at all. The worst part, though, is that it's a simple teleport and imparts no additional speed or momentum. And it cancels your already-finicky sprint, making it a really unreliable escape tool.

I never realized how critical the mantle is to Doom Eternal's moveset until I tried playing without it. It makes precision platforming much, much easier, because you can just aim your camera at a ledge and dash toward it. In Immortals, you can only guess when you're above a platform, unless you point your camera straight down at the floor which you never want to do in a game like this, especially midair, with a thumbstick. I was constantly over- and under-shooting ledges that I was aiming for.

Incomplete information wasn't just a problem with the platforming. In later levels fast-moving enemies are introduced, and they're dark-colored against a dark background with HDR-reinforced bright fireworks effects for the magic constantly flashing around. It got very hard to read the action in these fights.

It's also a looter shooter, which I find tedious. I don't like spending time dinkin around in my inventory. Ditto for the crafting and upgrade systems. I heard an interview with Bret Robbins, the game's director, who said he pretty much just threw in everything he thinks is fun in video games. Which, you know, fair enough that's probably exactly how I'd do it. But it also explains why it felt so crowded with mechanics. I felt like in this loot stuff there were too many choices that weren't different enough from each other to be interesting.

I would love to see this game iterated on more because it really does have some cool stuff going on. And Gina Torres, come on. It's absolutely unfair of me to compare this to Doom Eternal so much, and I definitely think there's plenty of room for movement-based shooters that aren't quite as tuned. And honestly if you're a shooter mechanics nerd like me it's probably worth picking up on sale to mess around with the shield; it is super cool. Come for the fireworks, stay for the crunchy shooter mechanics.

At the end of the day, though, I think what I appreciate most about Immortals of Aveum is that they went so all-out with the production values on a brand-new IP. Pretty sure I've said it before but it bears repeating: gusto goes a long way for me. I don't think big swings all need to be home runs. I think Immortals of Aveum, despite its terrible name and other flaws, earns its place in the canon kind of on the Duke3D side of the shooter tree, alongside The Darkness, Riddick and Bulletstorm: blemished but still brilliant gems that were made with a lot of grit and passion. I'd buy another Aveum game.

Trading guns for magic, you play as one of the special few who can wield all three colours of the arcane. You are armed with Blue (a Rifle), Red (a Shotgun), and Green (a Machine Gun) to mow down your foes. The writing is fun, and the voice acting is good. Although, you might struggle to find a character you actually like, as they are all different shades of asshole. The game claims you can build your character to fit your playstyle, focusing on powering up one colour or evenly spreading your points across all three. However, it then throws you encounters that require specific colours to defeat enemies, spitting in the face of those claims. Sometimes, a game can simply be "good". They don't have to all be masterpieces.

This game is the definition of failing to be more than the sum of its parts. If you were to take a 20 minute clip of any point of Immortals, you would see all of the standard components of a modern first person shooter game: light RPG elements, semi-open world areas to explore, chests to loot, gear to acquire, enemies to defeat with a mix of attacks, talent trees, and so on. The problem is that it can never successfully fuse these functional components into something greater.

There's never a sense of "wow that battle was really cool" or an emotional cutscene that truly makes you care about any of the characters. It's all just so utterly rote. The tragedy of this is that you can sense an earnestness in the team that made this to get there, but unfortunately I think they just missed the mark.

Considering this was a $70 title only a few months ago, I was surprised to see it for $8.99. After spending 20 hours with the game, I understand why and I think even at that price it's still not worth it. Buy a nice latte instead.

Playing on Xbox Series X the game is ripe with performance issues and let downs. Immortals is striving so hard to give you Doom-esque combat but when the framerate is dipping and diving all over the place in a frantic battle, it just doesn't work. I wish my gaming PC was newer to try it, because perhaps the experience would have been better.

"Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." - Coco Chanel - It's a combat system that just has too much and, at least on a controller, often leads to fumbling in battle. Three main weapons, three off weapons, six magic spells, melee, jump, double jump, hover, dash, sprint, and a grappling hook.... it's just a bit much, and I'd say about 20-30% of these are bland and lackluster. The spell parry ability was a standout favorite though, I really liked that.

Enjoyable characters and great voice acting was likely the only reason I completed this one. I wanted to like the story and the lore more, but it felt bland and uninspiring. As the player I really did not care one way or another how things turned out.

Rook for MVP.

The cool thing about local record stores is that you can find games like Immortals of Aveum, a game that came out two months ago, for $18 dollars. That's the perfect price to pay for this game, I feel.

You know what? This game is good. I haven't played a shooter in awhile so it was kind of nice, but this is by no means even in the top 20 of shooters of the last decade, or hell even this year, I bet.

There is no denying that it looks great. I'm playing with Performance mode on PS5 and it's smooth as butter. The visual effects of your weapon attacks and the more interesting environments are pretty dang nice. Particle effects people should be very proud.

The story may as well be white noise. I have nothing to say about it. After the prologue I put on my headphones and bumped my own shit while zoning out of exposition. I just don't care. Nobody cares. It's not as bad as Forspoken though.

It's the most mid game in existence. I have nothing good or bad to say about it beyond what I've already stated. No joy. No pain. Just a lukewarm numbness. That is Immortals of Aveum.

I just realized this game is a less interesting Ghostwire Tokyo. I think I should give that game another shot. I'd probably appreciate it more now lol.