Long gone are the days of EA stating that single-player games are dead. In 2023, they’ve turned back time and brought us multiple single-player titles in Dead Space Remake, Jedi Survivor and now Immortals of Aveum.
This led to a discussion with some friends that EA might be back in a significant way. Add in the well-received Need For Speed Unbound from 2022 (although I wasn’t much of a fan), and the signs are good……unfortunately dig a little deeper, and there are still the horrible signs of the EA of old.
Dead Space and Jedi Survivor were great games that rank highly on my Best of 2023 list, but both had issues, mainly in the way of performance. Does Immortals of Aveum running on the lovely new shiny Unreal Engine 5 manage to buck this trend? Not entirely, but there is enough on offer for me to recommend that you try the game for yourself at some point in the future.
Immortals of Aveum was developed by Ascendant Studios; it’s a first-person shooter game published by Electronic Arts and released on August 22, 2023, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows. To give you a brief idea of what to expect, take one part Doom, one part Doctor Strange spells and add some slightly cheesy dialogue, and you aren’t far off the game. I was pulled in by the flashy visuals on offer in the pre-release trailers and jumped in on day one, thanks to the joys of EA Play Pro on PC.
The game has been published as an EA Play Originals title, which has given us some incredibly diverse and original games like Fe, It Takes Two and Lost in Random. Again, Immortals brings us something slightly different, but it’s wrapped in a more AAA graphical style than we’ve seen in these more indie-style games.
You play Jak as his story begins as a humble street thief but quickly transforms into an epic adventure as he gains extraordinary magical abilities. His newfound powers lead him to be recruited into the Everwar, a never-ending conflict that has spanned thousands of years. The player controls Jak as he navigates the dangerous and unpredictable world of Immortals, fighting alongside his fellow warriors in a battle for the universe’s fate.
You’ll meet many characters you’ll fight alongside in your battle against the Rasharnians. The cast has a lot of back and forth that won’t be to everyone’s taste; think back to some of the writing Forspoken was criticised for earlier in 2023, and you’ll have a good idea of what to expect. Some of it made me laugh, and some of it made me cringe. I liked a lot of the characters and was disappointed not to get more of both Rook and Thaddeus, who you meet later in the game. I’ll tell you right now: I’d be up for a sequel or prequel featuring those two as a pair of main characters, as they were well-voiced and acted and stole any scene they were involved in.
In Immortals, you’ll experience fast and fluid first-person combat that revolves around spells. The game’s mechanics are designed to be easy to learn while still satisfying to master. Magic is both an offensive and defensive tool, and you’ll be encouraged to creatively utilise all three magical forces to your advantage. Your “guns” are magic channelled by sigils, with Blue magic being like a rifle, Red magic working like a shotgun, and Green as your machine gun. Enemies are coloured, and you’ll need to swap between your magic to ensure your weapons match this to do the maximum amount of damage to take them down quickly.
This is paired with abilities such as a shield, and a lash that can be used to pull enemies in close and also to travel across more significant gaps in the world. You also have access to spells that can be cast, more of which are found as you progress through the story. As you get further into the game, you’ll need to pair both of these with your more traditional gun-like blasts to take down growing numbers of attackers. I was particularly fond of lashing bad guys close to me into a blast from my shotgun, which worked even better once I had upgraded my gear and found some new sigils with improved stats.
On that point, you have several items that can be crafted or improved and new gear to be found as you explore. I was glad to see that the new equipment wasn’t just a number boost (although, in general, the highest-rated equipment will win the day), as they all have a different look. You can’t fully customise Jak, but there is enough for a little personalisation. To craft or upgrade gear, you’ll need to collect materials found in chests and breakable barrels that can be used at forges found in a few game areas, typically nicely placed before more significant boss battles or story elements.
All of the above lands together to give solid gameplay, but unfortunately, nothing that feels original. The finger gun play magic is excellent and a lot of fun, but don’t expect this to reinvent the wheel for FPS games. Immortals also features light puzzle and platforming elements in its gameplay. Although this mostly boils down to shooting the 3 coloured switches to open a door, one later mission saw me revert to a guide to work out how to progress the story. It’s simple but done well and never feels forced.
Although I enjoyed the story, it takes a little time to find its feet. As a game trying to tell the story of a war that has lasted for thousands of years, it tries to fit in a lot of backstory and lore in short cut scenes, and I did lose concentration a few times. However, by the last third of the game, I was loving it, as the game really picked up the pace and builds like a Marvel team-up movie to a huge final battle against the big bad. I suspect the story will be marmite with players; some will love it, and some will hate it.
As I mentioned, this is one of a few full game releases to run on Unreal Engine 5. If you’re into tech, you’ll have heard all of the new buzzwords that come with this new engine, such as Nanite and Lumen, essentially giving us better and more realistic textures and lighting. Immortals features many of these new features, and the game can sometimes look stunning. However, this comes at the cost of performance. On my highish-end PC, performance mainly was above 60fps at a mixture of high and ultra settings, but it also varied massively depending on the action on screen.
I managed highs of 165fps (my screen’s maximum), but a later and, to be fair, extremely busy section of the game with hundreds of particle effects also saw me play 15 minutes of the game at around 30fps at best. I’ll stress this was the only time I had issues like this, and my average for my 15-hour play thru was around 90fps, but it was still disappointing to experience.
Over on console, there is a target of 60fps, which the game sometimes struggles to hold. What is more surprising is that the game has a base resolution of just 720p and then uses FSR to upscale to 4k. This is much lower than most other games we have played this year. FSR actually does a reasonable good here, but your image might sometimes look a little soft. FSR also tends to have issues with quick-moving details, which I saw even on PC when switching between weapons.
This isn’t a game that has a lot to explore, with no real side content to speak of. There is a light Metroidvania element to the world, with specific sections only accessible once you gain particular abilities, but this is very underbaked, as other than gathering materials or looking for new weapons, there’s no additional story content to be found. I had no interest in going back to look for this by the end of the story, as I had already found a meaty shotgun upgrade that treated me well in my last few battles.
I’ve enjoyed my time with Immortal of Aveum, and although it has issues, I don’t want to be too harsh with a new franchise that gets so much right. It’s not going to be for everyone due to the way the game is written, but I’ve had a great time with the game, and it has some fantastic set pieces that grow in scale as the game goes on. I’d love to see what they could do with a sequel, should the game do well enough to get one.
-BigGP
