Immortals of Aveum wants so badly to be Doom Eternal, and at times it almost pulls it off. When I’m darting around an arena slinging spells and trying to outmaneuver a horde of evil wizards, it’s the same kind of frantic, adrenaline-infused experience the modern Doom games are known for. Combat is similarly puzzle-like with a skosh of resource management. Hurling the right spell at the right time to shatter your enemies’ defenses is the key to managing the battlefield, and spending mana efficiently can be the difference between easily controlling the crowd and getting overwhelmed. But unlike Doom, Immortal🥃s overloaded me with more abilities than my mind - or keyboard - could handle. The momentum of magical battles and the constant splash of colorful particle effects makes Immortal shine in trailers and livestreams, but it doesn’t feel as good in the hands as it looks on the screen.
Here’s a rundown of the abilities. Your right hand can switch between three spells - one red, one blue, and one green. These spells mimic traditional guns in an FPS (rifle, shotgun, and SMG) and have to be reloaded when they run out of ammo charges. Your left hand has three different spells, but these three have individual charge counts and cooldowns. Then you have six spells that require 🐼both hands, these share a mana pool and each has their own mana cost. You have a button for consuming mana pots, and a button for consuming health pots. You’ve got a jump (and double jump, and hover) and a dash (with its own cooldown). There’s a block button, a melee button, and a button that activates your ultimate - which has a separate resource meter from the rest of your spells.
If that sounds like a lot to manage, that’s because it is. Playing on mouse and keyboard, I struggled equipping the spells I wanted to use constantly. You have to scroll up to cycle through spells in your right hand, and scroll down to cycle through spells in your left hand, then you left click to fire from the right hand and right click to fire from the left. You need ༒to roll the mouse a single click to swap spells, but I kept accidentally scrolling too hard and cycling all the way back around to the same spell I already had equipped. In the heat of battle, when you need to quickly swap spells to break a shield or target a distant enemy, precision moves with the scroll wheel are incredibly cumbersome. I understand why it had to be this way, because there simply a♛ren’t enough buttons to go around.
All of your big spells are mapped to one through six at the top of the keyboard. As an avid FPS player, I can’t tell you the last time I had to reac💖h for the six, but I can tell you that I couldn’t find it consistently without looking down first. The cognitive load of managing Immortals’ controls quickly got in the way of my ability to stay focused on the battle, and while I didn🅺’t get a chance to play with controller, I have to assume its similarly unwieldy - and I wouldn’t enjoy playing a twitchy shooter like this with a controller anyway.
While burdensome, the wide variety of abilities🍎 adds variety and complexity to combat. Though I struggled to execute, I could understand how mixing and matching spells is meant to give you strategic advantages on the battlefield. The first tw🎀o-hander you learn is a ground pound that creates a moving wall of stone which instantly shatters shields, and if you follow the wall in you can follow up with a blast of shotgun-like red magic.
The blue magic is good for counter-sniping, but you can also use the grapple spell to pull distant enemies close, then shred them with your rapid-fire green spell. Weaving in dashes and bloc🐭king with your shield can help you avoid damage and reposition, and I found that an effective strategy was to dip in and 𓂃out of cover and focus down enemies with a barrage of spells.
Much has been made of Immor💫tals originality in the FPS genre, and while I do think it’s largely just an arena shooter with different coat of paint, some of the spells give you decent control over the battlefield. You can’t be as creative and free-wheeling as Doctor Strange, but the comb𒁏at is a lot more layered than Hogwarts Legacy.
Based on only a few missions, I don’t expect much from the narrative. The setting is a fairly cookie-cutter fantasy world where magic is a natural resource that🌱 several factions fight over, and your character is yet another white guy chosen one who’s naturally more gifted than everyone else (he can use all three magic colors instead of just one or two) but needs to get his ego checked before he’s worthy of becoming the hero he’s destined to be. His name is Jak. We’ve all been here before, and it’s easy to see where this is going. The dialogue is smothered in Marvel-branded ironic detachment that ev𝓰en an exceptional performer like Gina Torres can’t make sound fresh. I will say though that the models are remarkable. Between the character animations and the stunningly magical particle effects, this one won’t have any trouble passing the next-gen sniff test.
Despite my concerns, I’m happy to see EA put a big heap of money behind a new studio and a new IP. The c🌳ontrivances in its story don’t come across as cynical, and the flaws in its combat feel like genuine attempts to juice the genre with new ideas. Doom Eternal is not the worst game to chase, and I’m willing to be pretty forgiving to a debut title from an indie studio falli🐼ng short of one of the best games of the decade. Lucky for Immortals, July 20 is pretty much wide open for game releases. I expect a lot of people wrapping up Final Fantasy 16 will be giving this one a try, and it may turn out to be the perfect low-impact palate cleanser - if the controls don’t prove to be too much of a nuisance.