Immortals of Aveum Review

"Pew Pew, Magic"

Campaign

August 31, 2023 at 5:21pm
By Jason Stettner

This is a rather interesting experience, it’s essentially a first person shooter game with magic being what you blast out. It’s story structured and impressively long in terms of its narrative. It provides at least ten hours of story content, yet at the same time that did feel somewhat bloated with how repetitive the gameplay can get.

You play as Jak, joining an elite order of battlemages that are tasked with fighting in an everwar. That might sound rather cool, and at times the premise actually is. There’s also some darker stuff going on in the backdrop and in general the world itself is shadowed by terrifying secrets that few do have the knowledge of.

You’re joined by a varied cast of characters that seem to randomly come in and out of the story. I did find a fair bit of the dialogue a bit annoying, yet at the same time some of it was enjoyable so mixed results there I’d say.

I do enjoy the small down time bits that show up in terms of character connections though I do wish they would have tightened some of what your character is saying. While playing you will visit these semi-open world locations as part of your story. The game is linear, but these spaces allow you replay portions afterwards to find secrets or well in general it allows the developers to rehash the same space multiple times over.

There are quite a few times where they reuse level content, and then there’s also the ethereal space that’s rather drab so I felt these spots seemed a bit lazy honestly. I was overall fine with the story being told here though. I do have a bit of a desire to see this universe expanded upon as it had some interesting concepts and lore going on.

Gameplay

Probably the coolest part of the experience is that you have an array of magical spells to use upon enemies. You gain more abilities as you continue to progress and the screen can be filled with particle effects. On the flip side of that the game uses some aggressive FSR (AMD SuperFidelity) so it’s often incredibly fuzzy and muddy is the best way to describe it.

There were times where I literally couldn’t actually tell what things were within the environment. So with that on Xbox Series X you get a reconstructed image from like 720p at 60fps with some performance issues coming up while playing. It’s using Unreal Engine 5 so apparently that is just incredibly demanding and I’m not sure it’s really going to be the best of experiences this gen on consoles since the results here weren’t the best visually.

Moving past that you will be doing some light traversal using a number of tools. The swinging hook of sorts, kind of like a grapple hook was incredibly awkward to use and barely functioned for me. I hated those parts so much. The light puzzle bits were fine and I largely knew the direction I was headed in while playing.

Which makes sense since it was linear. I think in general they hit the fantasy elements well, just wish the clarity was better to enjoy that more. Oh, and as mentioned prior you can go back to explore the slightly open areas to solve extra puzzles for more bonuses to use. The game has slight upgrading/crafting elements for tools so that factors in.

The Conclusion

Immortals of Aveum provides a surprisingly lengthy narrative; but with that a rather bloated and repetitive one with magic that while cool, is hard to see with the blurry visuals. There were far too many set pieces used multiple times over and the same enemies but with spongier health bars got old fast. I liked some of the dialogue, whereas other bits were a tad too cringy for me to deal with.

There are weird elements of the story where characters randomly vanish or appear and that felt off. I certainly have some issues with this one but honestly it’s fine game. It’s just, largely forgettable and not something that stands out too much. It’s a universe I’d like to see expanded upon as I do see potential, but I’m fine with this being a standalone story.

The visuals leave a lot to be desired as you literally couldn’t tell what stuff was happening on the screen at times which is a shame since the particle shots from your weapons looked so cool. It was almost a game where the team tried to punch too high and didn’t fully hit the mark. I do certainly like fresh experiences though so it was neat to see a magical game like this and I hope we get more with that sort of concept in the future.

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Immortals of Aveum Review on Xbox Series X
Review Code Provided by EA Creators Network

Rating Overall: 6.4