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Immortals Fenyx Rising reviewBreath Of The Child
Breath Of The Child
Immortals Fenyx Risingis the sort of name that you assume has a colon in it, even though it doesn’t. Apparently Ubi’s family-friendly mythical action-adventure had to change its name from Gods & Monstersafter a challenge from Monster Energy, which is fair enough. After all, how many times have you tried to pour a refreshing energy drink into your mouth, only to discover you have inadvertently smashed part of the Ancient Greek pantheon of gods into your face instead?
Immortals still has much more in common with a slightly more budget Breath Of The Wild, or anAssassin’s Creed Odysseymade from Duplo, than it does the nation’s most Lynx Africa adjacent can. And since I like both of those games, and Immortals incorporates some of their best bits, I very much like Immortals. It could be the surprise sleeper hit of the year, in fact, and I’m hoping it is.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on YouTube
Each god had a different area of the island they called home, ensuring that your adventures have varying backdrops: the green, waterfall laden gardens of Aphrodite; the grand temples and libraries of Athena; the scarred battlegrounds of Ares; the smoking workshops and automata of Hephaistos. Everything has the juicy, intense colour palette of a wholesome cartoon, even the baddies you face.
Saving the world in this case requires a healthy mix of combat, exploration and puzzle solving. The first of this list is bouncy, bloodless, and fun. Fenyx has a sword, which is nippy and restores stamina, a bow for ranged attacks, and a big axe that swings slow but gradually stuns your enemies until they fall over with comedy stars orbiting their heads.
The baddies themselves range from little soldiers, bigger soldiers (one variant of which can summon a group of small soldiers to protect him, and the first time I saw it happen I said “OH WHAT THE FUCK?” out loud), and mythical beasts ranging from the sad cyclops to the disturbing four-armed creepypasta monster. You’ll start seeing similar attacks - the minotaur and the chimera will both charge at you, that sort of thing - but when you’re thrown into a mixed group, and you add in your unlockable abilities like deflections, aerial combos and special attacks, you can’t sleepwalk through encounters.
To make combat easier, or at least less hard, you can unlock these abilities, increase your stamina and health, discover loads of cool gear with different bonuses and improve your armour and weapons at a home base where trickster god Hermes is kicking around being vaguely quippy. Most of this is technically optional, but it’s not really, as it’s kind of the cornerstone of the traversing and puzzling bits of the game.
You get all the different bits of in-game currency from exploring and solving puzzles. The puzzles are my favourite bit. The more involved, multi-stage Constellation puzzles send you scampering about to collect giant marbles to set on a board in a certain order. Odysseus challenges make you shoot one of yer magic flying arrows through hoops on the ends of axe handles, the axes themselves arranged as an assault course amongst, for example, the snaky loops of a stone hydra. Some challenges are little races through the landscape: fly up these waterfalls without touching the ground, that kind of thing.
Fuck these sorts of puzzles in particular
The puzzles are varied, and I know they must be made well because I despise some of them - but not random ones. No, I just really fucking hate any of the ones that involve lasers, because I can’t get my head around the timing of them, or which order to push the blocks in. I frequently resort to forcing Fenyx to walk through the lasers whilst chugging health potions, like they are a World War I battalion facing the machine guns and I am an ambivalent general back at HQ.
Immortals does start to feel a bit grindy, too, if you crush it up and mainline it too much in an evening. It’s a game to be played at leisure over the Christmas break, not shnarfed down as quickly as possible. And the further you go, the harder and more involved it gets, and the deeper the references to Greek mythology get, to the point that I started to wonder who this was aimed at. It didn’t feel like it was aimed at kids.
