stradiwhovius
Recent Activity
Wanyal
completed
Immortals of Aveum
Where to start with this game... It is way too ambitious for a debut title, and it feels like they should have committed to a linear title with much smaller scope before making something like this.
All the mechanics are there, there's light metroid-vania progression, there's a loot game, there's first person shooting, there are puzzles. None of these mechanics are quite as satisfying as they should be, and maybe the mechanics ancillary to the first person shooting could have been missing from a hypothetical first title, and maybe it would all be a bit better if something of this scope was a sequel.
As for the first person shooting, this is the meat-and-potatoes of the game, and the abstraction of magic-as-guns doesn't work for me. It takes away a lot about why guns are a great abstraction for a video game, like being limited in how much you can shoot by ammo, being able to pick up another gun if you're bored with your current one, and a lot of the customisation modern games embrace by way of weapon attachments. What shooting is here is let down by having to stick with the best set of 3 guns you have (limited to one precise pistol/rifle type, one splash-damage shotgun/grenade launcher type, and one bullethose-y SMG type), until you find one better than what you have. Enemies are mostly uninteresting as they boil down to be either cannon fodder or a bullet-sponge that does big areas of damage, for a specific weapon colour, or a boss. The end boss is a recycled version of a mini-boss that then becomes a normal enemy, and one boss is the same as a mini-boss "but much bigger this time". You do get tools to use in combat along-side the core shooting, 6 extra small range or single target abilities, an ultimate beam, 3 tools you can swap between, but I forgot about most of them for the vast majority of the game.
The puzzles are a lot of "shoot a blue, red, and green things in the wall with the appropriate weapon within a small time limit". The metroid-vania aspects can actually confuse the player a little bit because theyre used to gate areas with story progression sometimes. You'll get an ability you can use on things in the world and you will get new loot, cool! You will then find another puzzle of the same kind, and try as you might, you cant complete it, only to discover it is actually only active at certain points in the story. The world that ties them together isn't particularly interesting to go through, the art direction doesn't seem particularly inspired and you also have a "lava world" and "snow world", and "shanty town".
The rest of it, is just a bit janky. There are lots of interactions that are implemented in an ameteur-ish way. Interaction prompts require you to be close to them AND look at them to be interact-able, grapple hooks have a cool-down and the leash has a cool-down too, the map is cluttered and difficult to use with a mouse and keyboard, dialogue menus have a distinct delay between selecting an option and the game acknowledging your choice. I could bring up so many little interactions that are just irritating and could have used polish, but if I did this would end up the length of a novel.
The story is a mess. Dialogue is instantly dislikeable in that over-done Joss Whedon manner where several characters don't take this serious world of a magical forever-war seriously. Characters seem to see twists coming, waive away questions the player might have about aspects of the world, or just belligerently withhold information seemly only because you're only supposed to find certain things out later in the script. There are so many proper nouns to keep track of that it becomes very hard to remember of which one is a faction, which one is a place, which one is a person, and which ones even matter at all. Otherwise you have a pretty standard-fare story about war, resources, and betrayals.
I am generally not a graphics buff, but I do appreciate when a game looks nice, and looks unique. I don't see how people seemed for fawn over the game's technology when it runs pretty poorly on a good spec PC. Trying to use the game's settings menu to dial in settings is basically pointless as there are no explanations for what settings do, just an obtuse points-based system that doesn't accurately reflect what each setting does or what it's performance impact is.
I didn't hate my time with this game, but it does seem like the team stretched themselves very thin for their first project, and it shows in almost every inch of the game-play. Again, I would have liked to seen this game's combat mechanics in a linear, smaller game first, and then a game like this with much more polish in a sequel, but that is not what we got.
All the mechanics are there, there's light metroid-vania progression, there's a loot game, there's first person shooting, there are puzzles. None of these mechanics are quite as satisfying as they should be, and maybe the mechanics ancillary to the first person shooting could have been missing from a hypothetical first title, and maybe it would all be a bit better if something of this scope was a sequel.
As for the first person shooting, this is the meat-and-potatoes of the game, and the abstraction of magic-as-guns doesn't work for me. It takes away a lot about why guns are a great abstraction for a video game, like being limited in how much you can shoot by ammo, being able to pick up another gun if you're bored with your current one, and a lot of the customisation modern games embrace by way of weapon attachments. What shooting is here is let down by having to stick with the best set of 3 guns you have (limited to one precise pistol/rifle type, one splash-damage shotgun/grenade launcher type, and one bullethose-y SMG type), until you find one better than what you have. Enemies are mostly uninteresting as they boil down to be either cannon fodder or a bullet-sponge that does big areas of damage, for a specific weapon colour, or a boss. The end boss is a recycled version of a mini-boss that then becomes a normal enemy, and one boss is the same as a mini-boss "but much bigger this time". You do get tools to use in combat along-side the core shooting, 6 extra small range or single target abilities, an ultimate beam, 3 tools you can swap between, but I forgot about most of them for the vast majority of the game.
The puzzles are a lot of "shoot a blue, red, and green things in the wall with the appropriate weapon within a small time limit". The metroid-vania aspects can actually confuse the player a little bit because theyre used to gate areas with story progression sometimes. You'll get an ability you can use on things in the world and you will get new loot, cool! You will then find another puzzle of the same kind, and try as you might, you cant complete it, only to discover it is actually only active at certain points in the story. The world that ties them together isn't particularly interesting to go through, the art direction doesn't seem particularly inspired and you also have a "lava world" and "snow world", and "shanty town".
The rest of it, is just a bit janky. There are lots of interactions that are implemented in an ameteur-ish way. Interaction prompts require you to be close to them AND look at them to be interact-able, grapple hooks have a cool-down and the leash has a cool-down too, the map is cluttered and difficult to use with a mouse and keyboard, dialogue menus have a distinct delay between selecting an option and the game acknowledging your choice. I could bring up so many little interactions that are just irritating and could have used polish, but if I did this would end up the length of a novel.
The story is a mess. Dialogue is instantly dislikeable in that over-done Joss Whedon manner where several characters don't take this serious world of a magical forever-war seriously. Characters seem to see twists coming, waive away questions the player might have about aspects of the world, or just belligerently withhold information seemly only because you're only supposed to find certain things out later in the script. There are so many proper nouns to keep track of that it becomes very hard to remember of which one is a faction, which one is a place, which one is a person, and which ones even matter at all. Otherwise you have a pretty standard-fare story about war, resources, and betrayals.
I am generally not a graphics buff, but I do appreciate when a game looks nice, and looks unique. I don't see how people seemed for fawn over the game's technology when it runs pretty poorly on a good spec PC. Trying to use the game's settings menu to dial in settings is basically pointless as there are no explanations for what settings do, just an obtuse points-based system that doesn't accurately reflect what each setting does or what it's performance impact is.
I didn't hate my time with this game, but it does seem like the team stretched themselves very thin for their first project, and it shows in almost every inch of the game-play. Again, I would have liked to seen this game's combat mechanics in a linear, smaller game first, and then a game like this with much more polish in a sequel, but that is not what we got.
3 days ago