1.5/5 ★ – RoseFNV's review of Immortals of Aveum.

Admittedly a little saddened by my reaction to this one cause on paper this should have been a slam dunk; it takes a call of duty style single player campaign (even spearheaded by multiple COD devs!) and mashes it with a magical combat system where you fire elements at your opponents as opposed to bullets and the groundwork for the story is fantasy bullshit instead of faux political military bullshit, which just sounds like a great time no matter which way you slice it. However, for all of call of duty's faults this does remind me of one thing I appreciate about the COD games. And that is their insistence on seriousness. This can hurt them when they try to tackle more mature ideas and fail, but for the most part it's often a nice breather from the many games a year that infuse themselves with comedy no matter how appropriate the situation or tone. Immortals of Aveum does not follow in Call of duty footsteps in this regard. Instead, it takes its fantasy fps setting and decides to intertwine it with Joss whedon on overdrive; every line a quip and every exchange a back and forth and each one is as absolutely excruciating as the last. Seriously, this is some of the worst dialogue writing I've ever heard in a video game and it's all delivered in an equally Insufferable manner by the actors, ESPECIALLY the lead who might just be my least favorite character I've ever played as outside of maybe lords of the fallen 2014. it starts from the very first mission and never lets up till the last, outside of one military commander character, who is my favorite character on the basis that she never spouts as much unfunny drivel as everyone else here (even if that doesn't exactly make her interesting), but that's more than made up for by the relentlessness of the rest of ensemble. Seriously even if this game had a somewhat decent story, which it doesn't, I wouldn't be able to appreciate it cause of just how obnoxious the Dialogue is at all times and it's such a shame. As for the rest of the package, it ranges from serviceable to bad. The storytelling itself is extremely sloppy, occasionally flirting with interesting ideas but they're poorly developed and I'm so distant from the characters that it's hard to care about anything. Neat worldbuilding though, you can tell it's written by someone with experience in that department and I wish it was used on a Better game that was able to do something of value with all the lore. Visuals are mostly ugly, sure it's UE5 but all that does is pump up the fidelity; art direction wise it's mostly dull and there's a lot of examples of really awkward texture work and lighting, especially in these weird pocket realms with these awful blocky floors that made my eyes feel like bleeding. Music is boring and repetitive, VAs do an okay job and sometimes even good, no problems there, but this doesn't include the main guy, who's as bad as his writing. Runs well enough but occasional frame stutters and glitches with the UI and lip syncing are somewhat common. Gameplay is basically the main reason I kept going through this, which makes it quite funny that I can't even say that the gameplay is very good. It's magic shooting does feel largely solid and I appreciate the various tools that the character can use in battle alongside the spells but most combat encounters fail to find a real flow or balance, with enemy designs that feel like they're complimenting an Action based combat system with dodges and an emphasis on movement but then using movement to dodge attacks barely works and dodges themselves are too limited to be relied upon, so you just gotta move around slowly taking bullets while shooting and it just kinda feels shitty. Every boss is reused at least once aside from one on mission 16, even the final boss is an evolution of a boss you've already fought once or twice. I wouldn't be as annoyed by the boss re-use if they weren't used during random encounters, but they are, no matter how appropriate they fit into combat scenarios. Despite all this and the shitty loot systems, the gameplay is still largely decently entertaining, falling squarely into the mindless fun category, but it never feels as good as it could with more tinkering, and it definitely annoyed me almost as often as I was going through it. So yeah, the game sucks. Was hopeful this would be something I click with, magic shooters are a concept I really like and Ghostwire Tokyo is a great example of this combat system being done right but this is just a failure in almost every regard; a meandering and overly expository DND campaign run by the least funny person alive that overstays it's welcome and keeps going long after it feels like it could've ended, leading to an overall shitty experience that made me wish I just never bothered. Would say that I hope the studio can improve some of these ideas for their future game, but considering how badly they were hit with Layoffs I'm fairly certain that's not an option for them anymore. Oh well, at least I'm done.