With a fairly big line-up of releases this season from Ubisoft, one of the most eye-catching and unique is Immortals Fenyx Rising. Originally given the title of Gods & Monsters, Immortals Fenyx Rising is an adventure game set in the Golden Isles, a fantastical place rooted in Greek Mythology, following a Greek soldier named Fenyx. Despite its set main character, players have the freedom to imagine Fenyx however they wish, and the result is a cross between Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, and Ubisoft’s most exciting game this year.
Even in a world of extraordinary games, there are always things to fix, and Immortals is no exception to this. From puzzle challenges to potion-making to character customization, there are some things that, even if they aren’t dealbreakers, are certainly worth giving more careful attention to.
10 Puzzles and Platforms
In Immortals, the open-world format gives players plenty of things to do. Bearing much resemblance to Breath of the Wild in its environment, Immortals has placed challenges and puzzles, rather than quests, all over the map that must be completed to help advance the player. The puzzles use players’ skills that are learned over the course of the game, but they aren’t as complex as they are just time-consuming.
Some are tragically easy, some are tedious, and some simply have a lot of steps to them; but moving forward, should the map be expanded to feature other areas to explore, refreshing the cycle of challenges with new and different challenges would give it more life.
9 Taming The Wild Beasts
A la Red Dead, Immortals allows players to tame fantastical beasts strewn across the Golden Isles and turn them into mounts that make travel across the gorgeous landscape so much easier. Having a mount is a huge help in the game. However, the taming system isn’t challenging in the slightest. In a game where challenges and puzzles seem to be the crux of it all, it’s surprising to find that taming can be done with the click of a single button.
Rather, taming should join the ranks of possible challenges to complete throughout the story. Some creatures are more mythical than others, and having a taming system that accounted for it would provide another enjoyable aspect to the game.
8 Potion Crafting
Potions are essential to this game. Players will find themselves frustratingly at odds with any boss battle without a healthy supply of potions. Potions assist with health and stamina, among other things, and players are responsible for gathering materials from the land to craft these potions. Yet, even though potions are crucial to the gameplay, crafting them is not as accessible a task as it should be.
To craft potions, players must reach locations called Cauldrons of Circe. They’re not the most populous of locations in the Golden Isles, so it would be in players’ best interest to stay on top of their locations. With such reliance on potions in combat, crafting should be more accessible no matter where in the Golden Isles players are.
7 Some God Powers
The soldier Fenyx is a special character, able to use mythical powers from the Gods, such as Heracles or Athena. In total, there are 6 God Powers, each with a small upgrade tree that makes each one more effective in combat. Each power is unique and accomplishes very different things, so players will find themselves using different combos of the powers all the time.
The number of powers works for the scope of the game currently; yet, Ubisoft has announced DLC that would expand the game. With expanding the game, players should be able to expand their arsenal of God powers to include new ones that keep the expansion going in all aspects.
6 Weapon-Based Styles
In combat, there are essentially three attacks players can use: light attacks (which take health), heavy attacks (that help stun enemies), and God powers (dealing massive damage). Within these attacks, however, the weapons are not very different from one to another. All light attack weapons are the same, no matter how they look, offering little in the way of changing fighting styles. The same goes for heavy attack weapons.
Players have a bow, which provides two options of fire, and this does add another element to combat. Still, differences in weapons should provide players with differing combat play styles to accomplish their goals.
5 Voice Acting
More of a cosmetic issue than anything, Immortals features some stilted voice acting. There are plenty of jokes to go around for both children and adults, and the mood of the game is light-hearted at every turn, with Zeus and Prometheus taking turns on narration. Regardless, there are still moments in dialogue that fall flat or jokes that don’t quite deliver due to the less-than-spirited voiceovers.
Luckily, it hardly affects the game at all, rarely taking the players out of the narrative or the world. Simply, players have come to expect more from Ubisoft when it comes to voice acting, as Assassin’s Creed has, more often than not, succeeded in this field.
4 Character Facial Options
Perhaps one of the most talked about “issues” of the game is the character design. Players have freedom to create Fenyx however they see him/her, being able to change facial features and gender. There aren’t many options to choose from, but there has been less choice in games before. The issue here is that the characters, despite the customization, don’t look all that different.
Adding facial hair onto Fenyx does nothing to change his face; it just pins on hair like a child would place a mustache on a Mr. Potato Head. If players are allowed more customization of Fenyx in the future, it would be great to see an improvement in how Fenyx can be imagined and created on a more detailed level.
3 Frame Rate Performance
When the game first launched, issues with frame rate were glaring. A patch soon followed an hour before the embargo on reviewing the game, and it added massive improvements to how the game runs on consoles. Issues still linger, however, particularly with Switch versions of the game, with players experiencing improved-but-still-low frame rates and smoothness when playing in both docked mode and handheld.
It’s an issue that seems to be more than fixable, and Ubisoft has already taken steps to minimize that. As the game expands and settles into a solid player base, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly Ubisoft will make frame rate issues a thing of the past.
2 The Lack of Discovery
This is an element that made the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild such an amazing game to play: the feeling of discovery. When players saw something glowing from afar in Breath of the Wild, they must traverse the landscape to get there and figure out what it is. Immortals Fenyx Rising doesn’t require players to work that hard. Rather, Fenyx can use a sort of focused-sight power that zooms in and allows players to mark points of interest.
Once marked, it tells the player exactly what’s over there–a chest, a challenge, a crystal, etc.–and doesn’t demand exploration in the same way. For such an enjoyable exploring experience in Immortals, this seemed like a strange gameplay choice.
1 Combating Combat Issues
Combat in Immortals is one of the most fun aspects of the game, but it doesn’t come without its challenges. Obviously, fighting off multiple enemies at once is difficult, just as it should be, but the combat is based on a lock-on system from one enemy to another. When multiple enemies crowd an area, the lock-on is difficult to aim and detect, and the camera does not necessarily snap to each locked-on enemy. Instead, players could be locked onto the enemy to the left of them, but think they’re locked onto the one in front of them about to swing their sword.
This can lead to some confusing chaos. A simple camera-snap to a target would improve an already-wonderful combat system in spades.
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