Immortals of Aveum Review

Remember Immortals of Aveum? This game came out at the end of August. August of THIS year by the way. Three months ago. If you’re wondering why it was so quickly forgotten, just take a look back on all of those other games that came out in the past few years, which no one seems to remember.

Remember Ghostwire Tokyo? Probably not. This is due to the fairly simple idea that games such as these are shockingly mediocre experiences.

The Never-Ending Test of My Patience

In Immortal of Aveum, you play as Jack. That is not a joke. The main character in this tech-magic fantasy game is called Jack.

You play as Jack, a rare subset of person who can control all three kinds of stock magic at the same time. Jack can control the blue pistol/ semi-auto magic, the green machine gun magic, and the red shotgun magic.

Your world is embroiled in this perennial war called the “Ever-War”. This is THE most stock fantasy world you can have. All of the main beats, as well as all of the modern Western Marvel-esque quippy (and in this case anachronistic) dialogue is so so boring and generic. The entire game, down to its base concept feels like it was generated by an AI that was trained on Tolkien and Avatar. An AI which apparently only took the surface level parts of each work and includes none of the awe, intrigue, or genuine investment.

I’m something of a fantasy snob, and it’s a hard genre for me to get into, but I defy anybody to play through game and be in any way affected by the boring drivel this game seems to think constitutes world building or story telling.

At least it looks nice.

Get the Loot. Kill the Enemy. Get the Loot.

Short disclaimer: I’m a gameplay guy; there are stories in games that I love, but I am almost always here for the gameplay, and one thing I can’t stand is when a game system is so shallow that the skill floor is indistinguishable from its skill ceiling.

This is a big reason why I dislike the recent God of War games, and this is a fairly big reason why this game is as disappointing as it is. With so strong a premise and so unengaging a story, I was really praying for some engaging gameplay.

Now, granted, the skill tree is at least varied, and it’ll actually offer you some interesting new moves as opposed to the typical over-abundance of “+15% damage against stunned enemies” pseudo-rpg waste that many games have. The problem is that almost none of these upgrades are necessary.

I tried to play through the game on Hard to see how it was. I found that, like with most games like this (Witcher 3 especially) the difficulty begins as you would expect and then craters the second you get some ability or some skill on the skill tree that helps to trivialize encounters.

There’s nothing overly game-breaking in the skill tree, but there are no enemies in the game which require any more thought than “aim and shoot”. The typical enemy hordes will just rush your position and will funnel themselves toward you in easily killable lines, and the big bullet-sponge enemies will do little more than a slow AOE or two while they wait to be killed.

The weapon stats themselves have also fallen victim to this modern trend of everything being like an actual rpg. Every weapon and piece of equipment has stats, but they also oxymoronically lack any useful stats like DPS. So you’re either stuck eyeballing which one is better, or you’re spending half of your playtime on the equip screen doing basic arithmetic in your head. At a certain point, I just started equipping whatever was newest and that seemed to work fine.

In reviewing this I found that I had gotten the digital deluxe edition. Modern digital deluxe editions are strange in that they either offer you basically nothing or they just give you ‘helpful’ items that end up breaking the intended progression/ skill curve of the game. In this one, I got a few rings and bracers which augmented things like my critical hit chance and general damage with absolutely no downsides. I didn’t use them often, but why is it so standard now for games to effectively just give you cheat items when you buy the game? It’d be like getting a nigh-undetectable camo for pre-ordering the newest Metal Gear.

This is How Much!?

Full price. This is a full-priced game. granted, there are about 20 hours of content here. I went for the platinum and got most of the way there, but there were some missable things I had neglected towards the start of the game, and there’s no new game plus until the November 16th update, and who knows if I’ll even remember this game by then.

This game sucks not only due to how little I have to say aside from “That’s boring; this is fine, but this makes it boring”, but also due to how I’m almost sure this idea started out as something genuinely exciting, and it was just slowly whittled down by the ceaseless committee that seems to oversee so many of these nothing-type games.

The game at least looks and sounds nice, but the art style is bland to me, and none of the designs or spectacles were particularly interesting or wowing. It just looks good because it’s a PS5 game, and it has to. By some studio directive, I’m sure it HAD to.

This is THE most mediocre game I’ve played this year. It’s not as brazenly bad as Forspoken, but it’s also not interesting or fun to discuss in any other good or bad way. It honestly feels like I’ve spent the last few days doing nothing.