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Print the myth
I’m going to get this out of the way, because every outlet with a hands on preview of Ubisoft’s action-adventureImmortals Fenyx Rising(which used to be called Gods & Monsters) is going to say it somewhere.Immortals Fenyx Risingis aproperBreath-Of-The-Wildalike. It’s one themed around Ancient Greek myths, yes, but you’ve got yer horses you can tame, yer open world to explore in any order you like, yer physics puzzle dungeons and levitating rocks ability. You’ve even got yer stamina timer and ability to clab onto and climb up any vertical surface, like a particularly disquieting flesh spider.
Its similarities with Zelda is the first thing I ask associate game director Julien Galloudec about. He says it is always nice to be compared to very good games, but points to other titles as key influences on Immortals Fenyx Rising. “Games from the early 2000s - those action-adventure games like Jak And Daxter, Banjo Kazooie that were very action-adventurey in a more open world, with a lot of different challenges like puzzles and fights combined together,” he told me. “We wanted to do something with that, combined with the background of the Greek mythology.”
Ubisoft have been hanging around Ancient Greece a lot recently (including Galloudec specifically, who worked on big buff merc adventureAssassin’s Creed Odyssey). According to him, the team just loved Greek mythology so much that they wanted to keep making stuff with it. “We wanted to take all of that as the raw material and create something very different and fresh compared to what we did before,” he said.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
The first few fights I had, I was like “Ah, yeah, this is pretty easy, isn’t it? Just smash these lads with my axe, no bother.” And it is abitthat. You also have a sword for quicker slashing and a bow and arrow. At a base level, it’s pretty standard stuff, and you can pick up new weapons and gear from completing missions, and upgrade them with currency and special crafting ingredients you can find - kind of a simplified version of Odyssey’s gear levelling. (And, side note, Fenyx has a bird mate flying around with them as well, and can do far sight to highlight items of interest on the map.)
It can be a real challenge, and I did find myself going through reams of potions (one flavour each for health, defense, attack and stamina). I can see the potential, though, for enemies in the full game to be reskins that become repetitive, so I’m hoping there are more unique bosses and area enemies - like the aforementioned robots in The Forgelands, some of whom are still stomping about looking for a punchup - scattered throughout.
Probably the biggest surprise was in the puzzling. Immortals has Zelda dungeons in the form of the Vaults of Tartarus, which are extra special puzzle vaults in the underworld. “Each of them have a unique theme and a unique vibe,” said Galloudec, “and as you progress in the game you keep being surprised.” Look, they’re notasingenious as Ninty’s ones, but the two I did, a tutorialising one and a trap-dodging platformer, were decent fun.
More fun were the ones in the world, the third key pillar for Immortals. And they were surprisingly hard. One, a Constellation puzzle, had the ultimate goal of gathering up blue spheres and placing them in the right slots on the floor. But,like the magic roundabout in Swindon, this was a puzzle made up of several attendant puzzles. One involved pushing blocks through lasers, another was a timing and flight one, another involved reading an environmental clue and smashing up stones…
The contrast in lighthearted tone and colourful, cartoony art style, and actually pretty difficult, complex puzzles (harder than any of the box-pushing puzzles in tombs that you’re asked to do in Odyssey) made me wonder who the intended audience is.Kidsof all ages, perhaps? Galloudec said that making the game fun and memorable was the first intention, but that Immortals has a lot of difficulty options for different audiences.
“We include a lot of accessibility features and difficulty levels that are not just about fights and the amount of damage you can take or give in combat, but also how much you can be guided and helped with the puzzles and challenges,” he explained. “You have quite a lot of options and parameters you can tweak to make sure the experience fits your expectation in terms of challenge.”
You can, however, brute force puzzle solutions if you, like me, miss the ‘correct’ solution but work out that special attacks can send a weighted block flying in a desired direction anyway. Galloudec said he welcomes this: “An important part of the puzzle design for us was to make sure there are many ways to resolve them, depending on your experience as a player, the way you think and see things, and also depending on your progression and how much you’ve unlocked special abilities and perks.”
Back before the title change, of course, Immortals was supposed to come out in February this year. The extra time in the oven is actually partly for the reason for said name change, according to Galloudec. It was an opportunity to “push our vision and even challenge it.” The game changed to the point that they needed a new name “to be aligned to that updated vision”. It combines the timeless aspect mythology angle in ‘Immortals’ and the new hero on an epic journey with ‘Fenyx Rising’, which is fair enough, although I can’t really say I’m a fan.
