From the creative director of Dead Space and multiple Call of Duty campaigns comes Immortals of Aveum, a single-player first-person magic shooter set in an original fantasy universe engulfed in magic, rife with conflict, and on the verge of oblivion.
Reviews View More
The fundamental problem with Immortals of Aveum is that it is so utterly standard. I’ve never seen a game exactly like it, but I have certainly seen a lot of games that are very similar. I suppose it isn’t bad, and there is clear love put into the project, but I feel the effort was misplaced.
The narrative is what really hampers any potential enjoyment that might’ve been had. It’s worldbuilding is so simple yet has that problem a lot of games do where the characters just start throwing so many names and concepts around that it jsut becomes white noise. Seriously, basically every single line out of any character’s mouth with involve the name of someone, some place or some high concept regarding the political and magical systems. The result is a world that feels alien in all the wrong ways - it just existed as nice set dressing to me as I found it so utterly inpenetrable for the majority of the runtime. However in the closing hours of the game I did grow to appreciate the world building a bit more. The ending stretch of the plot, while flawed, is satisfying enough and I found that I was almost growing to like the game by the end.
The characters all leave nothing to latch on to. Both allies and villains alike are all incredibly uninteresting at best, while at their worst they can be absolutely intolerable. The dialogue is bad, both for its over-indulgence in exposition and just because they are poorly written lines. If I said it was Marvel-esque dialogue, that would be an apt fit - loathed as I am to use that as a point of comparison. It sacrifices it’s own potentially gripping tone to cram one-liners in all the time. Certain characters are worse for this than others, but the worst ones always seem to be hanging around to drag everyone down. All these weak links circle around a protagonist who is simply uninteresting and unlikable. I don’t care for his story one bit and I found him to be gratingly whiny. What happens to him right at the end is one of the laziest bits of writing I’ve seen in a hot minute, but I won’t spoil it.
The combat is the game’s fundamental flaw, which is a shame because it could’ve been the high point. However, throwing bolts of light at enemies that have no visable reaction is the antithesis of a visceral feeling combat engine. It’s sad, because there’s some okay ideas in there. The range of different spells is impressive, and the various enemy types are designed to be best tackled with a varied approach. But it just doesn’t feel good - and when the health bars get spongy in the mid to late game it feels even worse. I’d praise the game’s enemy variety, but it unfortunately stagnates about a third of the way in. The game opens with so many new types of foe being constantly introduced, and there’s a cool variety of early game bosses too. But then it just stops; boss fights become very infrequent and most of those early game bosses keep getting brought back as frustrating standard encounters, bogging down the pacing with their huge health bars and ridiculously high damaging attacks.
The game’s art direction was the clear focus and I will admit it does a great job. While the gameplay becomes repetitive, the world remains grand in scale and unique in presentation. The highlight for me has to be the sequence where you battle in and around the giant body of a colossus as it wades through the sea - that was just great start to finish. It is graphically very impressive (despite semi-frequent frame drops), however there is too much visual clutter during combat as everyone throws their light powers around. As stunning as the environments are, everything becomes a blur of flashing lights and HUD elements when any battle begins. It is common to not be able to see the enemy you are trying to shoot, which is great evidence that maybe they should've toned down the effects a bit.
In conclusion, this is a flawed title that is hampered by a lot of mixed elements. The open world, the gear mechanics, the skill tree; it’s all unnecessary additions to what could've been a much tighter experience. It might also have benefitted from writers that actually know how to write compelling dialogue.
The narrative is what really hampers any potential enjoyment that might’ve been had. It’s worldbuilding is so simple yet has that problem a lot of games do where the characters just start throwing so many names and concepts around that it jsut becomes white noise. Seriously, basically every single line out of any character’s mouth with involve the name of someone, some place or some high concept regarding the political and magical systems. The result is a world that feels alien in all the wrong ways - it just existed as nice set dressing to me as I found it so utterly inpenetrable for the majority of the runtime. However in the closing hours of the game I did grow to appreciate the world building a bit more. The ending stretch of the plot, while flawed, is satisfying enough and I found that I was almost growing to like the game by the end.
The characters all leave nothing to latch on to. Both allies and villains alike are all incredibly uninteresting at best, while at their worst they can be absolutely intolerable. The dialogue is bad, both for its over-indulgence in exposition and just because they are poorly written lines. If I said it was Marvel-esque dialogue, that would be an apt fit - loathed as I am to use that as a point of comparison. It sacrifices it’s own potentially gripping tone to cram one-liners in all the time. Certain characters are worse for this than others, but the worst ones always seem to be hanging around to drag everyone down. All these weak links circle around a protagonist who is simply uninteresting and unlikable. I don’t care for his story one bit and I found him to be gratingly whiny. What happens to him right at the end is one of the laziest bits of writing I’ve seen in a hot minute, but I won’t spoil it.
The combat is the game’s fundamental flaw, which is a shame because it could’ve been the high point. However, throwing bolts of light at enemies that have no visable reaction is the antithesis of a visceral feeling combat engine. It’s sad, because there’s some okay ideas in there. The range of different spells is impressive, and the various enemy types are designed to be best tackled with a varied approach. But it just doesn’t feel good - and when the health bars get spongy in the mid to late game it feels even worse. I’d praise the game’s enemy variety, but it unfortunately stagnates about a third of the way in. The game opens with so many new types of foe being constantly introduced, and there’s a cool variety of early game bosses too. But then it just stops; boss fights become very infrequent and most of those early game bosses keep getting brought back as frustrating standard encounters, bogging down the pacing with their huge health bars and ridiculously high damaging attacks.
The game’s art direction was the clear focus and I will admit it does a great job. While the gameplay becomes repetitive, the world remains grand in scale and unique in presentation. The highlight for me has to be the sequence where you battle in and around the giant body of a colossus as it wades through the sea - that was just great start to finish. It is graphically very impressive (despite semi-frequent frame drops), however there is too much visual clutter during combat as everyone throws their light powers around. As stunning as the environments are, everything becomes a blur of flashing lights and HUD elements when any battle begins. It is common to not be able to see the enemy you are trying to shoot, which is great evidence that maybe they should've toned down the effects a bit.
In conclusion, this is a flawed title that is hampered by a lot of mixed elements. The open world, the gear mechanics, the skill tree; it’s all unnecessary additions to what could've been a much tighter experience. It might also have benefitted from writers that actually know how to write compelling dialogue.
How the hell do you make wizard FPS this boring?!
I will bet $1000 that some EA producer said "In our focus testing, we found players didn't understand how to play the game." Which resulted in the worst tutorial since shooters from the genres dark-age of 2007.
EA apparently spent $40mil USD on marketing for this game. They literally blew so much money on marketing, that it was too scared to risk letting the devs make something actually fun. Now all those devs have lost their jobs and the earth has been salted so thoroughly that I will never get a Doctor Strange shooter.
This is all too sad. My hearts go out to the devs who clearly wanted to make something cool, and were held back in the most blatant example of publisher meddling I've seen in the last 10 years. Because not one creative that works in this industry could possibly have wanted to let this happen.
I should finally get around to finishing Amid Evil...
I will bet $1000 that some EA producer said "In our focus testing, we found players didn't understand how to play the game." Which resulted in the worst tutorial since shooters from the genres dark-age of 2007.
EA apparently spent $40mil USD on marketing for this game. They literally blew so much money on marketing, that it was too scared to risk letting the devs make something actually fun. Now all those devs have lost their jobs and the earth has been salted so thoroughly that I will never get a Doctor Strange shooter.
This is all too sad. My hearts go out to the devs who clearly wanted to make something cool, and were held back in the most blatant example of publisher meddling I've seen in the last 10 years. Because not one creative that works in this industry could possibly have wanted to let this happen.
I should finally get around to finishing Amid Evil...
Really enjoyed myself with this game, a very fun magic shooter.
While it has some cool concepts, the gameplay started to become rote and repetitive to me. The story was also extremely uninteresting, as were the characters, and while I respect the production values of the game given that it came from a first-time developer, it really needed more time in the oven.
Oynanış keyifli ve world building iyi ama hikaye çok kötü, karakterler tırt, bölüm dizaynı rezalet, düşman çeşitliliği yok gibi bir şey, bosslar kötü, zorluğun dengesi yok (ben oyunun en zor zorluğunda bitirdim, zorlandığım tek kısım bir iki tane salak bosstu o kadar) bu oyunu beğenmek istedim ama abi yok ya, oyun bittikten sonra ki keşif kısmı ana oyundan daha eğlenceli yemin ederim.
Harry Potter from multiverse