I originally abandoned this and didn't plan to go back to it, but eventually it occurred to me that I could just switch to easy mode for the bitchass fight that was making me rage out, and see what the rest of the game had to offer.
I had really high hopes going into this. It landed with no fanfare whatsoever and immediately disappeared beneath the wheels of the parade of once-in-a-generation releases this year. It looks really cool; the magic effects are bright and colorful, like fireworks. I figured in a stacked year like this it's like James Bond vs Godzilla; it doesn't matter how good you look in a tux when you're just gunk between a giant lizard's toes. I saw hidden gem potential and on balance I think it more or less delivered on this.
My first impression was quite good, as well. The characters are all memorable and likable, and the worldbuilding felt plausible and fleshed out without being cumbersome. The combat takes its cues from Doom 2016 and Eternal and all the pieces are in place for a really strong movement shooter.
I love the active shield mechanic. I think this is the most innovative and potentially impactful new idea I've seen in a shooter for a long time. The way it works is you can toggle your shield on and off. When it's on, you move slower (maybe like 60% speed?) but you don't take health damage. Health damage requires consumables to replenish and you can only carry a few at a time, so preventing it is a big deal. The shield has its own health, kinda like Halo's shield; if you take a few hits and turn off the shield, it will regenerate quickly. However if you keep the shield up long enough for it to lose all of its health, it will break, meaning it recharges quite slowly.
As you can imagine this quickly becomes a big part of combat. This isn't a cover shooter, and you're usually being flanked if not completely surrounded, so avoiding damage entirely just through movement is usually a losing battle. Knowing when to activate your shield and when to let it recharge is a really fun skill to build and knob to tweak your playstyle. You can pursue upgrades that add effects like damage or a knockback when the shield breaks that give you even more options.
Unfortunately, I found it hard to use the shield optimally. This is a game with a lot of buttons to juggle. It also has awful default controls that seem to depend on the player having two right thumbs, and does not offer any options for button remapping. I put two paddles on my Xbox Elite controller and this made things much more playable. It didn't solve the big problem, though, which is that there's just too many actions the player has to be constantly cycling through. I found the manual health and mana replenishment in particular to be a real chore. I remember a Diablo 3 dev once talking about how they wanted to give the player fewer, but more interesting choices. Manually clicking a button when my mana or health gets low may add tension and difficulty, but it's not interesting, and it distracts from the genuinely fun stuff like the shield and weapon swapping.
When I go full sweat mode and put on four paddles for high level Doom Eternal it's because I genuinely need all ten fingers for that experience. Every digit has a different, mission-critical tool for its flexible combat loop. The high complexity makes the game fill my brain like a gas, occupying every space; when it all comes together it's downright euphoric. Unfortunately, Immortals of Aveum gums up its toolset with chores. Manually sprinting, reloading and replenishing resources just slows everything down, and gives you really deflating ways to mess up (like dying with a bunch of unused health crystals).
I also had problems with the movement options. I found the blink teleport to be extremely unsatisfying. For one thing, the distance is laughably paltry. I kept waiting for an upgrade that never came. It's so short that in first person perspective, when everything close to you is off-camera so you have no easy frame of reference, it often looks like you're not moving at all. The worst part, though, is that it's a simple teleport and imparts no additional speed or momentum. And it cancels your already-finicky sprint, making it a really unreliable escape tool.
I never realized how critical the mantle is to Doom Eternal's moveset until I tried playing without it. It makes precision platforming much, much easier, because you can just aim your camera at a ledge and dash toward it. In Immortals, you can only guess when you're above a platform, unless you point your camera straight down at the floor which you never want to do in a game like this, especially midair, with a thumbstick. I was constantly over- and under-shooting ledges that I was aiming for.
Incomplete information wasn't just a problem with the platforming. In later levels fast-moving enemies are introduced, and they're dark-colored against a dark background with HDR-reinforced bright fireworks effects for the magic constantly flashing around. It got very hard to read the action in these fights.
It's also a looter shooter, which I find tedious. I don't like spending time dinkin around in my inventory. Ditto for the crafting and upgrade systems. I heard an interview with Bret Robbins, the game's director, who said he pretty much just threw in everything he thinks is fun in video games. Which, you know, fair enough that's probably exactly how I'd do it. But it also explains why it felt so crowded with mechanics. I felt like in this loot stuff there were too many choices that weren't different enough from each other to be interesting.
I would love to see this game iterated on more because it really does have some cool stuff going on. And Gina Torres, come on. It's absolutely unfair of me to compare this to Doom Eternal so much, and I definitely think there's plenty of room for movement-based shooters that aren't quite as tuned. And honestly if you're a shooter mechanics nerd like me it's probably worth picking up on sale to mess around with the shield; it is super cool. Come for the fireworks, stay for the crunchy shooter mechanics.
At the end of the day, though, I think what I appreciate most about Immortals of Aveum is that they went so all-out with the production values on a brand-new IP. Pretty sure I've said it before but it bears repeating: gusto goes a long way for me. I don't think big swings all need to be home runs. I think Immortals of Aveum, despite its terrible name and other flaws, earns its place in the canon kind of on the Duke3D side of the shooter tree, alongside The Darkness, Riddick and Bulletstorm: blemished but still brilliant gems that were made with a lot of grit and passion. I'd buy another Aveum game.
I had really high hopes going into this. It landed with no fanfare whatsoever and immediately disappeared beneath the wheels of the parade of once-in-a-generation releases this year. It looks really cool; the magic effects are bright and colorful, like fireworks. I figured in a stacked year like this it's like James Bond vs Godzilla; it doesn't matter how good you look in a tux when you're just gunk between a giant lizard's toes. I saw hidden gem potential and on balance I think it more or less delivered on this.
My first impression was quite good, as well. The characters are all memorable and likable, and the worldbuilding felt plausible and fleshed out without being cumbersome. The combat takes its cues from Doom 2016 and Eternal and all the pieces are in place for a really strong movement shooter.
I love the active shield mechanic. I think this is the most innovative and potentially impactful new idea I've seen in a shooter for a long time. The way it works is you can toggle your shield on and off. When it's on, you move slower (maybe like 60% speed?) but you don't take health damage. Health damage requires consumables to replenish and you can only carry a few at a time, so preventing it is a big deal. The shield has its own health, kinda like Halo's shield; if you take a few hits and turn off the shield, it will regenerate quickly. However if you keep the shield up long enough for it to lose all of its health, it will break, meaning it recharges quite slowly.
As you can imagine this quickly becomes a big part of combat. This isn't a cover shooter, and you're usually being flanked if not completely surrounded, so avoiding damage entirely just through movement is usually a losing battle. Knowing when to activate your shield and when to let it recharge is a really fun skill to build and knob to tweak your playstyle. You can pursue upgrades that add effects like damage or a knockback when the shield breaks that give you even more options.
Unfortunately, I found it hard to use the shield optimally. This is a game with a lot of buttons to juggle. It also has awful default controls that seem to depend on the player having two right thumbs, and does not offer any options for button remapping. I put two paddles on my Xbox Elite controller and this made things much more playable. It didn't solve the big problem, though, which is that there's just too many actions the player has to be constantly cycling through. I found the manual health and mana replenishment in particular to be a real chore. I remember a Diablo 3 dev once talking about how they wanted to give the player fewer, but more interesting choices. Manually clicking a button when my mana or health gets low may add tension and difficulty, but it's not interesting, and it distracts from the genuinely fun stuff like the shield and weapon swapping.
When I go full sweat mode and put on four paddles for high level Doom Eternal it's because I genuinely need all ten fingers for that experience. Every digit has a different, mission-critical tool for its flexible combat loop. The high complexity makes the game fill my brain like a gas, occupying every space; when it all comes together it's downright euphoric. Unfortunately, Immortals of Aveum gums up its toolset with chores. Manually sprinting, reloading and replenishing resources just slows everything down, and gives you really deflating ways to mess up (like dying with a bunch of unused health crystals).
I also had problems with the movement options. I found the blink teleport to be extremely unsatisfying. For one thing, the distance is laughably paltry. I kept waiting for an upgrade that never came. It's so short that in first person perspective, when everything close to you is off-camera so you have no easy frame of reference, it often looks like you're not moving at all. The worst part, though, is that it's a simple teleport and imparts no additional speed or momentum. And it cancels your already-finicky sprint, making it a really unreliable escape tool.
I never realized how critical the mantle is to Doom Eternal's moveset until I tried playing without it. It makes precision platforming much, much easier, because you can just aim your camera at a ledge and dash toward it. In Immortals, you can only guess when you're above a platform, unless you point your camera straight down at the floor which you never want to do in a game like this, especially midair, with a thumbstick. I was constantly over- and under-shooting ledges that I was aiming for.
Incomplete information wasn't just a problem with the platforming. In later levels fast-moving enemies are introduced, and they're dark-colored against a dark background with HDR-reinforced bright fireworks effects for the magic constantly flashing around. It got very hard to read the action in these fights.
It's also a looter shooter, which I find tedious. I don't like spending time dinkin around in my inventory. Ditto for the crafting and upgrade systems. I heard an interview with Bret Robbins, the game's director, who said he pretty much just threw in everything he thinks is fun in video games. Which, you know, fair enough that's probably exactly how I'd do it. But it also explains why it felt so crowded with mechanics. I felt like in this loot stuff there were too many choices that weren't different enough from each other to be interesting.
I would love to see this game iterated on more because it really does have some cool stuff going on. And Gina Torres, come on. It's absolutely unfair of me to compare this to Doom Eternal so much, and I definitely think there's plenty of room for movement-based shooters that aren't quite as tuned. And honestly if you're a shooter mechanics nerd like me it's probably worth picking up on sale to mess around with the shield; it is super cool. Come for the fireworks, stay for the crunchy shooter mechanics.
At the end of the day, though, I think what I appreciate most about Immortals of Aveum is that they went so all-out with the production values on a brand-new IP. Pretty sure I've said it before but it bears repeating: gusto goes a long way for me. I don't think big swings all need to be home runs. I think Immortals of Aveum, despite its terrible name and other flaws, earns its place in the canon kind of on the Duke3D side of the shooter tree, alongside The Darkness, Riddick and Bulletstorm: blemished but still brilliant gems that were made with a lot of grit and passion. I'd buy another Aveum game.