Like its title, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Immortals of Aveum is forgettable and full of jargon.
The new first-person shooter from EA and Ascendant Studios, puts you in the shoes of Jak as he goes from stealing to scrape by to a high-ranking soldiering sorcerer. The floppy haired teen is a street kid from Seren, a city that hovers just over the Wound, a massive magical void in the middle of the game’s sci-fi fantasy world. When you meet Jak, he's with his best friend Luna on a balcony in a theater, fishing a coin purse from the pocket of a wealthy man watching the show beneath them. Money in hand, they head back to the home they share with two younger kids, a makeshift family eking out an existence in a society indifferent to them.
After this introduction, I was eager to see where Immortals of Aveum was headed. Seren is a cool setting, with tenement buildings stacked on top of one another stretching up into the sky, all while the shining Wound glows below. The dynamic between Jak and Luna also offers an emotional core that's easy to connect to. But their time together is coming to an end, and so is their time in Seren. Luna plans to join the army of their kingdom, Lucium, to fight in the Everwar — an ongoing conflict between two factions of magic-using soldiers called Magni. When the opposing power, Rasharn, attacks Seren, Jak ends up joining the fight too.
Early on, Jak passes a test that allows him to advance from a soldier to become one of the titular Immortals, which seems to be the equivalent of going from being a low-level officer to a general. It's here that the specific, grungy fantasy atmosphere gives way to something more generic as Jak moves on to missions among caves and forests, ice and lava, fighting back against Sandrakk, the leader of Rasharn and a former Immortal. It’s all a bit familiar in its execution and wrought with jargon that doesn’t do the world building any real favors.
If all of that sounds like a lot of proper nouns, well, it is. I first noticed Immortals of Aveum when it was shown at Summer Game Fest this summer, and I was surprised by how much of the gameplay breakdown was focused on lore, with star Darren Barnet appearing onstage to reel off information on the game's world, before throwing to a trailer that was even more jargon-filled. But that was an honest look at the game.
Immortals of Aveum is constantly throwing new terms like Pentacade and Aelori and Binding Stone at you. It balances that intense focus on world building with quippy humor that has denizens of this fantasy world talking like characters from a bad Netflix show. It does help to ground the story as you're getting to grips with all the big ideas, but it has a distancing effect over time. The stakes just don't seem real when the characters can turn on a dime from being deathly serious to a "He's right behind me, isn't he?" joke. The game would benefit from being more po-faced because certain elements of the world — like Seren hovering over the Wound — are genuinely interesting and would benefit from a more melodramatic exploration.
Like the tone, combat is a little too bright for its own good. Jak is a battle mage, wielding spells instead of guns, and the colorful lights you fire at opponents and the similarly neon beams they fire back make it tough to see anything else. That's especially true in some of the murkier environments, where I had a difficult time making out where enemies even were as everything glowed around them. In the pre-release build on PS5 there was no way to adjust the brightness settings. Adding a gamma slighter could go a long way toward making this work better. As it is now, the game is bizarrely difficult. I found the default setting closer to what I would expect from a hard mode, and easy was closer to a traditional normal.
The bigger problem with combat is that it doesn't do much with its ideas. The magic spells Jak wields are basically just guns, and not nearly as satisfying to use. By default, his red spell does a lot of damage up close like a shotgun, his blue spell is functionally a rifle, and his green spell fires off a machine gun clip's worth of emerald orbs — though these can be changed to behave like different guns by equipping new gear. The spells are unimaginative, but what really slows things down is that enemies are just bullet sponges. Harder fights aren't especially thoughtful; the game just throws a big ass regenerating shield and a huge health bar on them and wishes you luck for the next boring half hour.
Jak has some other abilities and items designed to level the playing field. He can throw up a shield, which comes in handy given how difficult combat's cacaphonous colors makes it to see incoming attacks. He can also throw Limpets, green goo that can slow enemies down (slightly) and he has a magic beam that can break their focus, allowing you to attack. More importantly, he has a grappling hook that can be used to fly to glowing attach points. That sounds like it should feel really cool, but the game requires such pinpoint accuracy that I rarely used it during fights unless I could take a second to line up with the grapple point. Otherwise you’d take damage and be better served just sticking to your arsenal of generic glowing weapons..
The Everwar between Lucium and Rasharn reminds me of what it feels like to play Immortals of Aveum, a game that feels perpetually at war with itself. Its jokey tone is at odds with its high stakes and the world it wants you to care about. Its movement-focused arena design is at odds with the precision it would require to make it start to sing. Its magical flavor is at odds with how bland its combat is. Its name may suggest something that will last forever, but I doubt I'll remember much about it by the end of next week.
Immortals of Aveum is an FPS with a difference, in that magic is the main weapon. As the battlemage Jak, you're tasked with protecting the world of Lucium during the Everwar.
