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Immortals Of Aveum review: a sometimes fun magical romp that lacks sparkPress X to reload (your arm)
Press X to reload (your arm)
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts
A challenge: hold your arm at a right angle to your torso, bent at the elbow so you can see your wrist and hand in the corner of your eye. Keep it there for as long as you can. Hurts after a while, huh? This is the default position for Jak, awesome FPS wizard with a magic gun arm, and possessor of a personality so inoffensive that when I am not playing the game I struggle to remember he exists. I noticed how hard it is to hold your arm in wizard mode when I was about 10 hours into the 20-or-so span ofImmortals Of Aveum, and half way through is too early for a game to make me go all Cinema Sins out of boredom.
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Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts
The blasting is really the focal point, as Immortals Of Aveum was arguably conceived as ‘what ifCall Of Duty… butmagic?’. But whoever built the huge temples here did not see fit to include waist high walls; this a run-and-gun in style, more akin to a Doom or a Wolfenstein. You blast magic from the bracer on your arm - and the design here is intelligent, attaching different designs and even noises for each colour of magic, so you can easily tell them apart even in the heat of battle, and even if they don’t actually feel very physically different to use. Within that you can equip different versions of bracer that change up your attacks. Maybe you pick fewer blasts traded for higher damage on your red shotgun magic, or enemy seeking green rounds vs lower damage shots but 80 of them. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself reaching for your blue arm, though, because it has the most consistent balance between damage and speed.
Tech issuesAbsurdly high minimum specs aside, I did find it a gnatz janky, the longer I went on. It’s easier to play with a controller, what with all the ability hotswaps you have to do, but I also encountered a few bugs, such as conversations that wouldn’t trigger, and enemies that had clipped through walls. Eh, probably a magical accident. Thankfully, there’s a Day One patch that will hopefully address a lot of these issues, but James has more on how to get thebest performance from it here.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts
Like Doom, you’re supposed to constantly switch between your magic gun fingers, and the game gives you extra tools to work in tandem. There are special attacks for each type of magic, and special tools with cool downs, including a whip, shield, and a stun beam. When you’re approaching a moment of flow you whip a floating archer towards you to blast them in the head, throw up your shield just in time to block a big hit from the giant flail bastard, and swap to your stun to spellbreak the enemy mage and make her explode the three lads next to her as well. Plus, you can upgrade your abilities, so maybe when your shield shatters it explodes, pushing that big flail bastard back so you can red-blast him in the face.
There’s an enemy in there, if you can believe that |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Electronic Arts
