The mighty Ubisoft Gods have molded a fragile world that's just as puzzling as the Collyer Brothers' labyrinthian apartment.
The moment I lost hope for Fenyx: Rising Immortails was during the first real boss fight: Achilles the Corrupted Hero. Okay so like, you know how Achilles Heel is a thing? Well, one of Fenyx's Achilles Heels is the combat. If you exploit Dark Achilles obvious weakness you don't stun him or deal massive damage (His HP is insane btw). No, what happens is you do maybe 10 points more damage, and he kinda stumbles for half a second before attacking again. The combat system is so reliant on it's tedious stamina mechanic that even boss fights feel copy-paste. Simple concepts such as dealing extra damage for headshots are locked behind a skill tree which makes the beginning of the game a slog. All of the skills feel like a gamechanger but it's an artificial feeling because all they do is curtail the epic fun you have button-mashing to death OC do not Steal Jaba the Hutt, and cute lil' boars high on bath salts. One of the few skills you unlock that feels like a legitimate skill is slowing down time when using a bow mid-air. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Let's double back on epic Achilles battle again. I personally finished the fight by shooting his foot (it's literally bandaged) and then went in with heavy attacks when he finally gets stunned; this took me roughly 25 minutes. The faster solution is to ignore the famous weakness and just parry his first move and hit him with some heavy axe attacks, rinse and repeat (It feels bad... like exploiting AI bad). Wanna know the real kicker? When you stun him with the axe: he falls down and gestures towards his foot and grabs it. This fucking caned animation doesn't make even make sense in context. What kind of game punishes you for exploiting a bosses weakness?
Beyond my issues with the combat there's a lot of cool looking armor and weapons to find in chests and finding them is the best part of the game, however there's another "but" here. I didn't feel any of the benefits of the equipment. During the Achilles fight I was wearing a hood that gave the bow extra damage if I was at full health, but like it still took me 25 minutes slay Achilles. There's many concepts they utilized that originated from Breath of the Wild (which I have no issues with), but they decided to not implement the actually interesting subtleties like having equipment have a more important role with the world itself. I don't get any cool moments like being struck by lightning during a storm, or changing to more appropriate clothing for hot or cold climates, nope, we just get static buffs that don't make much of a difference.
There's a lot of other problems here too. The map is refreshingly more compact than Ubisoft's previous titles, however it's so cluttered with cliffs (The map is 80% mountains man!) god statues, useless broken bridges, and the usual copy-paste temples/houses/statues. Navigating the map is a nightmare, you spent half the game slowly climbing up endless cliffs. You can't utilize your mount because the map has zero flow to it. Remember how all the Korok puzzles subtly blended in with the environment aiding the atmosphere? Ubisoft thinks you're a fucking idiot because all of the puzzles are marked with red. You can't walk 30 seconds without spotting these blights upon the land. It clashes with the mood they're trying to set (not to mention red wall blocks are archaic at this point). The camera is too zoomed out and left me feeling detached from the world and it's characters. I want to see the details of the art but I can only do that with the camera feature, not naturally. I think this is the worst world Ubisoft has crafted. The surreal style I think they tried to accomplish just ends up looking like some glitched auto-generated terrain from Sim City.
Puzzles range from pushing boxes onto pads, pushing balls into holes, throwing rocks at damaged walls, and platforming; there's no innovation here. You get the feeling you've seen all the puzzles Fenyix has to offer puzzle within the first few shrines. The ball puzzles are infuriating because the physics are wonky; the shrine where I fought Achilles starts with you pulling a lever to spawn a ball which moves across upward wind tunnels, and you have to speed-platform (movement feels sluggish) to catch the ball before it falls off the other side of the platform it's headed towards. My first three attempts the physics failed and caused the ball fall into the abyss before it even reached it's destination. It's random if this lever works as intended. You could say GTFO OR GET GUD at platforming and catch the ball before it falls but the controls are baffling and unintuitive. Like why is square crouch? Why does pushing the analog sticks do nothing useful? Why are the R1/R2 the attack buttons? It's impressive how this game manages to feel sluggish even outside of the game. You can change the controls but honestly I didn't feel like playing the text-based version of sliding block puzzle that is fixing the controls, I'm already sick of finishing the actual fucking sliding block puzzles in the game itself. No thanks.
I'm going to finish off this review with a video I took showcasing how passionless this game is.
https://twitter.com/chadhacheydev/status/1413024881265029120?s=20
The moment I lost hope for Fenyx: Rising Immortails was during the first real boss fight: Achilles the Corrupted Hero. Okay so like, you know how Achilles Heel is a thing? Well, one of Fenyx's Achilles Heels is the combat. If you exploit Dark Achilles obvious weakness you don't stun him or deal massive damage (His HP is insane btw). No, what happens is you do maybe 10 points more damage, and he kinda stumbles for half a second before attacking again. The combat system is so reliant on it's tedious stamina mechanic that even boss fights feel copy-paste. Simple concepts such as dealing extra damage for headshots are locked behind a skill tree which makes the beginning of the game a slog. All of the skills feel like a gamechanger but it's an artificial feeling because all they do is curtail the epic fun you have button-mashing to death OC do not Steal Jaba the Hutt, and cute lil' boars high on bath salts. One of the few skills you unlock that feels like a legitimate skill is slowing down time when using a bow mid-air. Cool. Cool. Cool.
Let's double back on epic Achilles battle again. I personally finished the fight by shooting his foot (it's literally bandaged) and then went in with heavy attacks when he finally gets stunned; this took me roughly 25 minutes. The faster solution is to ignore the famous weakness and just parry his first move and hit him with some heavy axe attacks, rinse and repeat (It feels bad... like exploiting AI bad). Wanna know the real kicker? When you stun him with the axe: he falls down and gestures towards his foot and grabs it. This fucking caned animation doesn't make even make sense in context. What kind of game punishes you for exploiting a bosses weakness?
Beyond my issues with the combat there's a lot of cool looking armor and weapons to find in chests and finding them is the best part of the game, however there's another "but" here. I didn't feel any of the benefits of the equipment. During the Achilles fight I was wearing a hood that gave the bow extra damage if I was at full health, but like it still took me 25 minutes slay Achilles. There's many concepts they utilized that originated from Breath of the Wild (which I have no issues with), but they decided to not implement the actually interesting subtleties like having equipment have a more important role with the world itself. I don't get any cool moments like being struck by lightning during a storm, or changing to more appropriate clothing for hot or cold climates, nope, we just get static buffs that don't make much of a difference.
There's a lot of other problems here too. The map is refreshingly more compact than Ubisoft's previous titles, however it's so cluttered with cliffs (The map is 80% mountains man!) god statues, useless broken bridges, and the usual copy-paste temples/houses/statues. Navigating the map is a nightmare, you spent half the game slowly climbing up endless cliffs. You can't utilize your mount because the map has zero flow to it. Remember how all the Korok puzzles subtly blended in with the environment aiding the atmosphere? Ubisoft thinks you're a fucking idiot because all of the puzzles are marked with red. You can't walk 30 seconds without spotting these blights upon the land. It clashes with the mood they're trying to set (not to mention red wall blocks are archaic at this point). The camera is too zoomed out and left me feeling detached from the world and it's characters. I want to see the details of the art but I can only do that with the camera feature, not naturally. I think this is the worst world Ubisoft has crafted. The surreal style I think they tried to accomplish just ends up looking like some glitched auto-generated terrain from Sim City.
Puzzles range from pushing boxes onto pads, pushing balls into holes, throwing rocks at damaged walls, and platforming; there's no innovation here. You get the feeling you've seen all the puzzles Fenyix has to offer puzzle within the first few shrines. The ball puzzles are infuriating because the physics are wonky; the shrine where I fought Achilles starts with you pulling a lever to spawn a ball which moves across upward wind tunnels, and you have to speed-platform (movement feels sluggish) to catch the ball before it falls off the other side of the platform it's headed towards. My first three attempts the physics failed and caused the ball fall into the abyss before it even reached it's destination. It's random if this lever works as intended. You could say GTFO OR GET GUD at platforming and catch the ball before it falls but the controls are baffling and unintuitive. Like why is square crouch? Why does pushing the analog sticks do nothing useful? Why are the R1/R2 the attack buttons? It's impressive how this game manages to feel sluggish even outside of the game. You can change the controls but honestly I didn't feel like playing the text-based version of sliding block puzzle that is fixing the controls, I'm already sick of finishing the actual fucking sliding block puzzles in the game itself. No thanks.
I'm going to finish off this review with a video I took showcasing how passionless this game is.
https://twitter.com/chadhacheydev/status/1413024881265029120?s=20