A Smaller, More Condensed Map
With its Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs series, Ubisoft has perfected its style of open-world adventure. The map’s always teeming with things to see and do — and in the case of the Assassin’s Creed games especially — the maps almost feel overwhelmingly massive.
Take Valhalla, for example. The maps are gargantuan and the many mysteries, world events, and wealth orbs scattered across the map would take hundreds of hours to check out for yourself. It’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand you’ve got an abundance of content to keep the disc spinning in your console for months, but on the other it can feel as though you’re barely scratching the surface of the game no matter how many hours you pour in, demotivating you from progressing further.
Not everyone’s the same, but that’s where Immortals: Fenyx Rising feels like it slots perfectly in Ubisoft’s library of open-world adventures.
Immortals: Fenyx Rising features a much smaller map than the likes of Valhalla and makes traversing it, completing side missions, and visiting points of interest a much more streamlined process. This all combines to make Immortals a roughly 30-hour experience, despite still offering a trove of deity-based delights.
It’s Actually Funny!
Reasons to Be Hyped for Immortals: Fenyx Rising
The story in Immortals focuses on Fenyx as they’re washed up on the Golden Isle and must free the essences of Gods locked away by the Titan, Typhon. While the story beats are often played out in stunning cutscenes, you’ll also have a running commentary from Zeus and Prometheus, who are arguably the stars of the show here.
The duo are fantastically voiced and often provide some comic relief which is actually funny. I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.
Zeus and Prometheus bicker amongst themselves frequently, with Zeus ignorant to the plight his actions have led to, and Prometheus becoming enraged as he tries to make the God of Lightning accept responsibility for his actions.
Honestly, it’s the kind of storytelling that we need to see more of in video games, with some fantastic breaking of the fourth-wall to get you ‘in’ on the jokes. Developers take note, Ubisoft’s struck gold with their dynamic deity duo.
The Combat’s Incredibly Satisfying
We’ll admit, not everything about Immortals is incredible. The environmental puzzles that Fenyx is tasked with completing leave a lot to be desired, often feeling like gameplay that we experienced back on the Xbox 360 and PS3. They’re not bad… just uninspired.
But push through these and you’ll be treated to some of the most enjoyable melee combat we’ve experienced in a long time. There’s a real focus on fast-paced combo-building here, with perfect dodges and parries opening up enemies for a flurry of fast slashes and strikes.
This isn’t a game you can simply button mash your way through, and you won’t want to. Pulling off a perfect dodge triggers a slow-mo effect, allowing you to take in all of the beauty amidst the chaos.
Where Assassin’s Creed’s combat has been tried and tested, Immortals takes this formula and mixes it up to give it a fresh, fun feel more in-keeping with the Fenyx Rising’s aesthetic and we’re all for it.
Zelda Breath of the Wild Vibes on PlayStation & Xbox!
Reasons to Be Hyped for Immortals: Fenyx Rising
I mean, the elephant in the room had to be addressed at some point, right?
Immortals: Fenyx Rising takes a lot of inspiration from Nintendo’s 2017 GOTY-grabbing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Its art style, stunning world design, and even right down to the stamina bar all feel like they’ve been cherry picked from Link’s debut adventure on Switch.
While this is still a relatively far cry from Breath of the Wild, for those that have been itching to get a bit of that Breath of the Wild magic on their PlayStation or Xbox, Immortals is the closest you can get to that right now.
Its puzzles don’t come close to Breath of the Wild’s brain-melting shrines, but you can’t have everything!
Another Game Optimized for PS5 & Xbox Series X
This one may not apply to everyone planning on picking up Immortals immediately, but it’s certainly something to note for those who have been lucky enough to pick up an Xbox Series X or a PS5. Immortals: Fenyx Rising has been optimized to take advantage of all that extra 4K horsepower your shiny new system offers up.
From a post over on the Ubisoft website, we know that Immortals: Fenyx Rising will run at 60fps in 4K on both the Xbox Series X and PS5. Both systems will also display the game in HDR, and will have improved sound thanks to their Dolby Atmos and Tempest 3D Audio engines respectively.
PS5 players get a special extra enhancement thanks to the haptic feedback of the DualSense controller.
Finally, those SSDs tucked inside the Series X and PS5 will ensure load times remain minimal and unobtrusive to your gameplay experience. If you’ve been loving everything your next-gen console has offered you so far, Immortals looks set to be another early showcase of what these new consoles are capable of.
Its Season Pass Is a Breath of Fresh Air
Reasons to Be Hyped for Immortals: Fenyx Rising
For those planning on picking up the Gold Edition of the game — or just choose to buy the Season Pass separately — there’s plenty of exciting content on the horizon for Immortals once you’ve wrapped up the main story.
The Season Pass is set to bring three new ‘episodes’ of content, with a bonus quest thrown in to tempt you even more. But it’s the three episodes and their various tweaks to the core experience’s gameplay that really pique our interest.
In Episode 1, A New God, players will have to make their way through a gauntlet of challenges posed by the Gods that players met on Fenyx’s adventure. Players will head to Olympus and complete new types of puzzles and epic challenges in order to cement Fenyx’s position as part of the Inner Circle of the Pantheon.
Episode 2 — Myths of the Eastern Realm — introduces a new open-world area as players follow a new hero, Ku. Our new protagonist is tasked with resolving the brutal war that’s broken out between Heaven and Earth, using a new Chinese martial art-inspired combat system to take down epic new deities and monsters.
Episode 3 — The Lost Gods — is the most interesting of the three, as it sees players meet back up with Fenyx for yet another adventure with rebellious deities. Most importantly, The Lost Gods will also take on a top-down isometric perspective and switch up the combat to a brawler-style system.
What makes Immortals’ Season Pass so refreshing is how daring Ubisoft Quebec is being with its ideas. It’s pushing new combat systems, camera perspectives, characters and world maps, all of which could shake up the formula of the base game, without making it feel wholly different.
Whether you pick up the Season Pass will ultimately come down to how satiated you are after Fenyx’s first adventure, but it’s exciting to see developers trying new ideas within a Season Pass, rather than simply providing more story content on the same gameplay framework.
Immortals: Fenyx Rising is available on Xbox Series X| S, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, Google Stadia and PC on Dec. 3.
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