Ari Notis
(he/him) is a guides editor at Polygon, where he writes, edits, and shepherds service-oriented articles about the biggest games du jour. He previously worked at Kotaku.
Immortals of Aveum deserved better. And now that it’s among April 2024’s PlayStation Plus offerings, there’s little excuse for — hey, put those tomatoes down! — one of last year’s best games not to get its fair due.
Released last summer for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, Immortals of Aveum is a magical first-person shooter, essentially Call of Duty with fancy spells. But it’s also one of the rarest creatures in AAA gaming: a totally new (!!!) game. Not a remake, not a remaster, not tethered to or bound by things like sequelitis or “IP” — an actual new game with new ideas.
Still, despite a unique pitch and respectable marketing budget, which was estimated by one developer at around $40 million, Immortals of Aveum was almost totally bypassed last year. Critics largely panned the game at launch. (Polygon’s review described it as a “soulless” “paint-by-numbers buffet.”) And shortly after its release, developer Ascendant Studios laid off nearly half its staff, citing poor sales for Immortals.
But look between the headlines, and you’ll find an exceptional game. Magic in Immortals fits neatly into three categories: explosive red magic (basically rocket launchers and shotguns), hectic green magic (think SMGs), and precise blue magic (sniper rifles). You’re cast as a young street thief named Jak (Never Have I Ever’s Darren Barnet). A minor heist gone tragically wrong reveals Jak is an atypical individual who — get this — can use all three colors, and he’s summarily recruited into the front lines of a conflict called the “everwar.”
It’s all very silly stuff, and Barnet’s youthful cadence — which constantly comes off as joking, flirting, or both — appropriately sells that Immortals of Aveum doesn’t take itself too seriously. The tone feels like Call of Duty by way of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands.
Then the game opens up.
A few hours in, Immortals of Aveum pulls the coolest hat trick it possibly could and reveals itself as a full-on Metroidvania. There’s a world map, replete with red doors tagged with little X marks to indicate that you’ll need to double back later after getting certain upgrades. You’ll eventually attain various means of traversal, including a grappling hook and the ability to punch through force fields. And yes, for convenience’s sake, there’s fast travel. For Metroidvania fans (hi), it’s heaven.
The whole “use all three colors of magic!!!” gimmick stops being a punchline and becomes a necessity for combat. In most first-person shooters, you can brute-force your way through waves of cannon fodder. In Immortals of Aveum, enemies sport color-coded health bars; to effectively deal damage against mid- and late-game enemies, you’ll need to match the color of your magic to the color of the health bar, effectively forcing you to avail yourself of the game’s entire toolkit.
That rock-paper-scissors system is supported by a byzantine skill tree with unlockable abilities and incremental stat nodes, each of which can be upgraded multiple times. You can further finesse your stats with a dizzying amount of loot — from standard armor and accessories to “sigils” that change how your magic gun… arm… thing fires. Call of Duty with wizardry? Yeah, I don’t recall being able to min-max a 5.7% melee damage boost plus a 10.6% shield shatter rate in Black Ops: Cold War.
To be sure, Immortals of Aveum is far from perfect. Parts of the open world scream of needless padding, including dozens of optional puzzles and maddeningly difficult platforming challenges. (You can ignore them.) Some of the one-liners are truly groan-worthy. (A bit harder to ignore those.) The script is confident enough to bring up topics like climate change, unchecked capitalism, and the evils of colonization, but not so bold as to actually take a real stance on any of them. (Definitely can’t ignore that.)
But the blemishes don’t outshine how unique Immortals of Aveum is in its space. If there’s one throughline in modern games, it’s that our biggest tentpoles are marred by a general lack of novelty. Sure, not every new game needs to be instantly canonized, à la popular franchise entries like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3. But the fresh ideas will only have a shot at cultural immortality if we let them.
Source: Polygon
