Official Review PlayStation 5 Updated

Immortals of Aveum (PlayStation 5)
Official GBAtemp Review

Name: Immortals of Aveum
Item: Immortals of Aveum
Rating: 7.4
Author: KiiWii

Product Information:

Release Date (NA): August 22, 2023
Release Date (EU): August 22, 2023
Publisher: EA
Developer: Ascendant Studios
Genres: FPS RPG
Also For: Computer, Xbox Series X|S

Game Features:

Single player

Local Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer

Co-operative

Immortals of Aveum is a fantasy-driven first-person shooter set in a world full of magic and where you are the weapon!

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Immortals of Aveum is the first game by developers Ascendant Studios, but they have lineage: some of them are ex-Call of Duty employees and it shows. With shooter-heavy gameplay with a mixture of elements such as multiple magic types, dragons, boss-battles, expansive upgrades, teleportation portals, and even platform traversing sections, IoA is a game with a lot going on and a twisty storyline to boot!

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Intriguing Narrative, Action Packed From the Get-Go

Firing the game up, you are met with EA's typical trash with regards to logging into an EA account first, then linking PSN IDs and then finally logging in and beginning a game. I don't know why any of this isn't optional, and why I have to log into EA's site, get a confirmation code sent to me, link an active PSN account, get another confirmation code sent to me, and then finally get in-game offline. Just let me play in offline mode anyway, it's a single player game!

Once I was past this absurdity, the game itself was relatively blissful to set up and get straight into gameplay. I didn't notice any graphical options to modify fidelity or performance which is strange given that the majority of games allow you to adjust settings for framerate over resolution. Although IoA does a stellar job of balancing visuals with a constant framerate in-game, I would have liked to see some options there.

The game sets the scene by introducing Jak and Luna, in an evidently poverty-stricken area of Seren's streets, in a world where magic projectiles are the norm, and quickly introduces Fife, Babs, and Caleb whom they care for and house in this desolate environment. We ascertain that it's Luna's birthday today and Caleb, offering her a present turns out to have been wounded in the process of light-fingerdly acquiring her a snowglobe. This triggers Luna's caregiver instincts into running out to obtain medicine & healing crystals with Jak from the richer haunts in order to patch up Caleb. However, during this daring thievery mission through the Hive, an invasion and series of air strikes begin to rain down on the city causing your first fetch-quest to end and the story to quickly take a dark turn.

Jak and Luna avoid the barrage of explosions only to be met with evil invaders, the Rasharnians, tearing up the town and killing the citizens. Before they can return they see their very own home blown up with Babs, Fife, and Caleb visibly still in there. Luna, a budding soldier who is just about to join up and fight, acts to divert the enemies' attention by firing at them in order to give Jak time to escape to safety. However, Luna is blasted away and falls into the abyss below, Jak rages at these developments and hulks out into an absolute war machine of magical proportions, completely demolishing those insurgent enemies for killing his longtime friends and family.

Kirkan, Field Marshal to the Light's army, sees your abilities during what happened and opts to take Jak under her wing, giving him training to become a Magnus. She also explains that their powers come from leylines that run through the shrouded realm, that the control of magic is what fuels the ever wars against Sandrakk and the Rasharnians, and that Jak, though gifted will never be a master mage, merely a Jak-of-all-trades, if you will.

Thus ends the prologue: on a baffling "so I'm never able to actually become ultra awesome?" note, followed by an intensely cinematic intro sequence that obviously has heavily Marvel-inspired quality to it, with dramatic music, superhero poses, ultra-slow-motion segments chained together and shrouded in special effects to really give you a big budget feel.

I have to say I was pretty impressed so far, and I was hooked!

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You Are A One-Man Army

Through learning the controls and assuming the role of an apprentice to Kirkan, you have a range of moves and equipment at your disposal. First and foremost as a shooter IoA uses Sigils (arm-mounted weapons), and these signify that you are a battlemage for the lights army.

As alluded to before: Jak is a Triarch. Gifted with all three colours of magic, though he trades mastery for versatility, and will never be the strongest at any single variation of magic, he mixes it up and blends three styles together to become a formidable lead protagonist.

Each type of magic can also be classified akin to a weapon, so blue magic is precision, like a handgun, or rifle. Red Magic is "violent" and more shotgun and grenade launcher-like with a closer range and a more powerful incendiary nature. Green Magic is classed as "curious" however it's basically similar to a machine gun, or with the homing stormshards upgrades: Halos Needler. The stronger your magic, the brighter the colouration according to Kirkan, and in practice, the more crazy you get with it all the more pyrotechnics you will see in a multitude of colours overwhelming your field of view.

Spell altars grant you power-ups such as shield, animate and blink. The latter is a dodge manoeuvre that propels you out of range of close-up enemies quickly, but without a lock-on trigger, I found it to be a pretty useless skill, to be honest. Animate augmentation allows you to interact with the environment in places at a distance, tilting columns or pulling out timer-restricted ledges for you to use, and the shield perk literally encapsulates you in magic to protect you from damage for a limited time.

One nice little feature is that the lightbar on the DualSense changes to whatever colour magic you have your Sigil switched to.

In terms of controlling the game, it's first and foremost an FPS layout with the following button configuration: Triangle switches Sigils, Cross jumps, double jumps, or hovers. The Circle button is used to skip dialogue or dodge "blink" in conjunction with a direction on the left stick. The Square button is primarily used to interact, but it also "reloads" your magic (draws power from the shrouded realm), hold to reload quicker with mana.

L1 is used for your shield, L2 for control spells, R2 to fire striking spells, and R1 to open your fury collection with an additional face button to use to select from four of them. Your touchpad also opens your map quickly so you can figure out where to go or what level you're on swiftly.

The D-pad holds the functions of pressing Right to heal with a crystal, Left to disrupt, Up to use your lash to pull enemies towards you, and Down to select limpets. Limpets stick to moving platforms and actively slow time down on the object it's touching, making traversing moving flaming, spiked platforms a doddle. L3 button sprints and R3 is your melee button but the cool-down time between punches is far too lengthy to be much use when surrounded, so use this as an absolute last option.

Discovering bracers, wraps and gear provides buffs or nerfs to your powers and current armour set, but you must choose wisely to find the best balance of power versus reload speed or rate of fire. Completing your training progresses you to the next chapter.

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Progressive Powers, Admirable Skill-Tree, Weird NPCs

Five years pass and Jak has now lost the mop-top hairstyle and gone full army mode, this is where the game starts to really give you a sense of freedom and the ability to prove yourself ready to go it alone to Kirkan. Taking off the training wheels lets you play about a bit more, experiment with your existing skillset and discover new powers to add to your Sigils' ever-increasing arsenal. Unlocking the forge to enhance armour, and tweak sigil variants to suit your playstyle comes a little later, but the game just keeps piling on more and more systems to enhance your character. Luckily none are overly complicated, and they're nice and easy to manage.

By beating mini-bosses, such as Dragons (Howlers) and Oathbroken, to name but a few, you will eventually unlock Arcanum to collect, which fills a new bar and earns ascensions that unlock new talents for each magic colour category, such as Spellweaver (Green), Deadshot (Blue) and Rampage (Red) for example. At this point, you are getting increasingly powerful and you feel like you can take on anything, but you must know your limits, and Jak finds that out quite quickly when he meets The Hand of Sandrakk.

Encountering this foe you realise that there is something about them, a dark enigma, but you're advised not to engage, only track and observe, Jak, flaunting a new range of freedom and powers, has other ideas. Now I won't go into specifics, but the second I saw The Hand I worked out who it was without a second thought. It's obvious tropes like this in almost every game or movie that this game could have avoided in order to give some additional user gratification. I was a little sad I worked it out so quickly, but then a second twist unfolded, and I did not see it coming!

Breaking up the action you enter villages, and cities that offer entertaining puzzles where you have to use the colour-coded magic shots to hit targets in certain combinations or pull levers and scale heights to find secret items. This element is pretty fun, as are the Cloud Fune "minigames" that are effectively First-Person platforming, where it sees you bounding across floating platforms, and battling waves of enemies that can smash you off to your death at any moment. This is great, and the AI you're up against is pretty reasonable in flanking you and swarming when you are low on mana, however, the NPCs you meet along the way are completely devoid of.. well .. anything.

No non-story-centric NPCs have dialogue, spoken or written, it's strange. Instead, while they gesticulate with props and their mouths chunter away in your direction or at other NPCs, there is just a really strange generic muffled talking vocal track used in place of anything rational. It feels like a placeholder asset used before final production and they just forgot to enable the function before going gold. I was quite aghast that with so much life breathed into the goings-on with shopkeepers, blacksmiths etc. in the background, not one of them is interactable, nor are they having throwaway conversations you can overhear. It's only at a celebration event party for Jak becoming an "Immortal" that you get a selection of about seven people to gather information from as you "mingle", though it's predominantly QTE menu-driven recap and waffle.

Overall I think that Immortals of Aveum is captivating and quite a blast to play through. It's clearly no paradigm shift, and whilst it doesn't break new ground in any way, it is still a very enjoyable experience overall. I was hooked on the simplistic firefights with enemies, the puzzles & twisty storyline and the non-stop enhancement of the main protagonist.

You could do a heck of a lot worse for £65, IoA is definitely worth a playthrough!

Verdict

What We Liked ...

Magical shooter crossover that's fun to play
Character facial expressions and clothing layers look top-notch
Landscapes & lighting effects are particularly nice
Heaps of background motion and detail in each location
Large skill trees to unlock
Plenty of armour and weapon enhancements
Twisty storyline elements

What We Didn't Like ...

NPCs cannot be interacted with
Background SFX sounds like muffled placeholders
Combat is overly simple
Guessable story beats

Gameplay

A hearty mixture of shooting with magical enhancements: Immortals of Aveum is a damned enthralling game with a constant pulse that keeps you engrossed throughout.

Presentation

This game looks wonderful and vibrant overall, the lighting is gorgeous, there is zero loading time when moving from area to area and even the menus are well laid out. There is a strange grainy texture that permeates everything that seems synonymous with the Unreal engine, and a little judder in some cut scenes but it's very minor. Special effects are lavish but sometimes overwhelm visibility during action-packed areas. NPCs are extremely odd though.

Lasting Appeal

With heaps of locations to forge through, three skill trees for magic, a modest campaign of around 20 hours, and 40+ trophies to pop: Immortals of Aveum has a decent amount to do for completionists, but it'll take a big grind.

7.4

out of 10

Overall

If you like simple shooters and want to mix it up with spellcasting magic, a bit of platforming, and minimal RPG elements; IoA is definitely a game you should pick up. I had a blast going through its various crusades and regardless of needing to know exactly what was going on half the time I managed to call several of the plot twists long before they happened.

Reactions: Xzi and Prans

Xzi
Aug 24, 2023

PC version reportedly runs very poorly on high-end hardware, and from screenshots I'd guess the PS5 version is being upscaled from 1080p? UE5 needs at least a couple more years in the oven.

Reactions: AngryCinnabon and KiiWii

Prans
Aug 24, 2023

Xzi said:
PC version reportedly runs very poorly on high-end hardware, and from screenshots I'd guess the PS5 version is being upscaled from 1080p? UE5 needs at least a couple more years in the oven.

no idea about this one but re: UE5, the recently-reviewed Fort Solis gives a strong impression of its graphical potentials.

Prans said:
no idea about this one but re: UE5, the recently-reviewed Fort Solis gives a strong impression of its graphical potentials.

Pretty much the same deal there. From where I'm sitting, UE4 at maxed settings and native resolution looks exponentially better than upscaled UE5. DLSS looks better than FSR, but neither should be relied on as a crutch. Both Immortals and Fort Solis sitting at "mixed" reviews on Steam for similar reasons.

Reactions: Prans

eyeliner
Aug 25, 2023

Xzi said:
Pretty much the same deal there. From where I'm sitting, UE4 at maxed settings and native resolution looks exponentially better than upscaled UE5. DLSS looks better than FSR, but neither should be relied on as a crutch. Both Immortals and Fort Solis sitting at "mixed" reviews on Steam for similar reasons.

I'm sure the mixed reviews don't come from visuals.
These games are overly ambitious for the team that made them, suffering in the gameplay department. Good, inventive mechanics, poor world building.

Xzi
Aug 25, 2023

eyeliner said:
I'm sure the mixed reviews don't come from visuals.
These games are overly ambitious for the team that made them, suffering in the gameplay department. Good, inventive mechanics, poor world building.

No, they come mostly from performance complaints, but it's doubly unacceptable to have poor performance on top of graphics that look like a step backward.

Reactions: eyeliner

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Product Information:

Game Features:

Intriguing Narrative, Action Packed From the Get-Go

You Are A One-Man Army

Progressive Powers, Admirable Skill-Tree, Weird NPCs

Verdict

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