Game Review: Immortals of Aveum

First-Person Shooters are a genre of video game often based in some loose interpretation of the real world or futuristic setting.  Whether it’s the likes of Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, Wolfenstein or Doom; the one common element that ties a lot of these well-known shooters together is guns.  Big guns, small guns, old guns, futuristic guns; you can put any spin on it but guns are an intrinsic element to be found in all of these titles.  On the other hand, when you look at high-fantasy based video games, most of the times they are often Third-Person based and rely on a mixture of hack and slash or projectile based gameplay.  It’s interesting to consider no one up to this point ever really considered to take a First-Person shooter and mix it in with a fantasy/magical element.  That was up until recently however, when developers Ascendant Studios took a bold leap in developing a game to combine both genres with Immortals of Aveum. 

Developed by Ascendant Studios and published by EA as part of their EA Originals banner, Immortals of Aveum is a First-Person based, magical shooter. Released on August 22nd 2023 across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, the title received mixed to average reception from critics and general audiences and undersold and missed their target sales expectations.  The average reception and poor sales sadly led the studio facing the risk of closure at the present time this review is going up.  The impact of the games poor performance is sad in a lot of ways, but it’s key to look at the game with an objective perspective and understand what worked in the games favour and what didn’t.

The world of Aveum is a world governed by one primary force; magic.  No one truly knows when magic came to be in the world, but its presence has been long lasting.  Magical currents known as leylines run through the world like a thread in the fabric of reality. It’s through these leylines that the five kingdoms of Aveum draw their magical abilities from.  Ever since magic came to be in the world however, the kingdoms have fought over the right to control it.  Known as the Everwar, this conflict has spanned for millennia and shows no signs of stopping.  You play as Jak, once a lowly thief in the heart of a bridgetown known as Seren within the kingdom of Lucium. When the Rasharnian forces invade Seren however, Jak’s way of life is lost when he loses his ragtag family in the wake of their invasion and is recruited into the Lucium army to fight as a Triarch, a being who has the ability to control all three forms of magic. Several years pass and Jak is promoted into an order known as the Immortals.  The Immortals are the most powerful of magical warriors from across the kingdoms., formed to defend Aveum from any potential world-ending threat.  It’s through the Immortals that Jak sets forth on a journey to stop the Rasharnian leader Sandraak from winning the Everwar by any means necessary.

The narrative scope of Immortals of Aveum is a mile wide but an inch deep to put it bluntly.  At every avenue there’s a plethora of potential teased within the setting and its respective world building.  This is anything but a conventional fantasy setting and I give great praise to the writers for really trying to define this world in a really unique and distinct way.  That praise only goes so far however, as the game struggles to deliver a compelling story within this world at every turn.  The dialogue is the worst part of this game for me.  The characters, along with their mannerisms and dialogue reflect something akin to modern day dialect.  You put that against the backdrop of this deeply fantastical world, it’s a jarring conflict that shows every time the characters open their mouths.  That’s not the worst of it either, the writing quality is really poor in this game.  I would compare it to the worst jokes in the latest run of Marvel films, the ones where they feel they’re being smart or quirky, but they are just being cringe.  The worst culprit is the main character Jak, his dialogue feels so generic you could almost copy and paste it from other modern-day projects.  It’s such a shame the games dialogue is so poor because it undercuts the potentiality of the world and the story it’s trying to tell. 

It's almost a consolation in the wake of the poor narrative that the game makes up for it in a very compelling side of gameplay.  Ascendant Studios really nailed the idea of a magical first-person shooter within the confines of this game. As mentioned, guns are the blueprint of most FPS games, but in this games case your ‘guns’ are your magic.  Sorted by blue, red and green magic (Deducting points for such a poorly generic label!), your magical abilities provide a useful means of taking out the game’s plethora of enemies.  Blue magic is precise, often allowing you to dispatch enemies from a distance.  Red magic is powerful, but unfocused, meaning you need to be up close to utilize it. Green energy is sporadic but plentiful, it allows you to dispatch enemies in quick succession.  The braces you obtain through the game allow you to attune the magic to be used in more interesting formats.  Add that along with the additional gear elements, you have a game with a lot of customization and utility.  It also helps that the enemies you face will challenge you to switch between your magic loadouts constantly. While there’s a nice variety to the enemies you face, it’s hard not to argue a lot of them can turn into bullet sponges during the later half of the game.

It's not all just shooting and looting however.  The game touts a remarkable sense of exploration functionality.  Akin to most Metroidvanias, you will unlock abilities as you progress through the game which will allow you to explore and bypass new areas and potentially unlock rarer gear.  Navigating the world and its levels is easy and fast, thanks to the portal system so it makes the idea of re-exploring feel less like a chore and more like a rewarding sidestep. It also helps that the world is so beautifully rendered and designed within the Unreal Engine.  Say what you will about the studio, but to say they were a first-time developer and was able to craft and render a world with this much vibrancy and color is a testament to their potential and a sad fact now we know they may never develop another game moving forward. 

I’ll be honest, I came into Immortals of Aveum expecting something painfully average.  I heard the reviews, I saw the general reception and prepared myself in respect of it all.  Despite all that however, my final thoughts on Immortals of Aveum are conflicted.  The games narrative is the most underwhelming part of the game for me.  To take a game and craft it so finely, only to deliver one of the most generic Marvel movie plotlines within it, feels like a great misfire.  What the game gets right though makes me feel somewhat compelled to recommend it.  It’s shooting mechanics are solid, the depth of rewarding exploration on offer is great and its visual scope is phenomenal. Even if the game is unremarkable in the large scale of things, it doesn’t diminish the solid value that it still has supporting its foundation.