Immortals of Aveum - Review/Thoughts
Immortals of Aveum is a new single-player first person magic shooter developed by Ascendant Studios and published by Electronic Arts.
I’ll be saying more about the game on next week’s episode of DLC, but since the embargo is up now, let me briefly say this:
Big new IP in games is exciting and worth celebrating. A focused, single player game in a world full of GAAS and open-world games is also worth celebrating.
Immortals of Aveum doesn’t do everything right, and it is launching in a year FULL of 10:10 games, but it brings a lot of fun to the table. It’s also a new IP and a focused, single-player game. More please!
The combat is my favorite part of the game. It’s a shooter, make no mistake about it, but it doesn’t follow the “left trigger, right trigger, grenade” approach that pretty much all shooters follow. It brings its own control scheme to the table and with it a whole host of magical abilities and powers. I really enjoyed the flow of the combat, and while it doesn’t control the same way as Destiny 2, I found myself feeling like I was in a combat flow very similar to how I feel while playing Destiny 2… which is one of my favorite modern shooters. Something about the movement abilities, powers, spells, and cooldowns gave me “Destiny-like” vibes, even if I was using different buttons on the controller to take down enemies. Opening chests throughout the levels, and upgrading my gear, etc also helped bring that “Destiny-like” vibe to things. Single-player Destiny 2, yes and please!
The story, however, left me flat. Not the big idea of the story. There’s a lot of world building and the lore that I found very interesting, but the way the story was told. The unskippable cutscenes, and the dialog. The characters often seemed nonchalant about what was happening. There were quips left and right, people feeling and acting “too cool for school,” and characters treating each other with a flippant and often arrogant attitude. I guess you could say it gave off the often-meme’d “MCU” movie dialog vibe. Bummer, because the facial animations and Unreal 5.1 tech is pretty fantastic in those cut scenes.
I’d also love to see this game on PC, with my “beefy-GP,” because I think Unreal 5.1 could really shine. As is, on my PS5, the image often looks soft and fuzzy, as the native resolution appears low and FSR doesn’t seem to make things as crisp and clear as I’d like. Yay for 60FPS though!
As I mentioned, I’ll talk more about the game on the next DLC, and while this game doesn’t feel like an absolute home run to me, I’m very excited for what Ascendant Studios does next.
I was provided a PS5 code by the developer.