3/5 ★ – UpwardBoss's review of Immortals Fenyx Rising.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is... okay. It's not great, not particularly bad either, just an alright video game. The game started off strong, with the opening 10 hours or so being a surprisingly fun start, but unfortunately, the game doesn't have enough variety to support its 32 hour length. Ultimately the game felt like it dragged more than Assassin's Creed Valhalla did. And Valhalla is 80 hours long. Formerly known as Gods and Monsters, Immortals Fenyx Rising is an open world Breath of the Wild-esque game, from the developers of Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Odyssey, Ubisoft Quebec. Unlike the Assassin's Creed games, this game has a much larger emphasis on puzzles, and actually does them quite well. There was a lot of different mechanics and the puzzles were intuitive while not being too easy, a good balance. Unfortunately, combat doesn't change much from start to finish, which is a shame, considering almost all you do is combat or puzzles. For a game to be as long as Fenyx Rising is, particularly with a bad story (more on that later) the combat progression needs to be good. Unfortunately I feel like Immortals didn't do a good job here. The open world is much smaller than the recent Assassin's Creed games, (about half the size, maybe smaller) but it unfortunately feels empty (which is for a narrative reason, but it still hurts the game). Side quests are very few and far between, and the majority of open world side content being open world puzzles. The structure is very typical Ubisoft, except for the way you uncover them. Similar to Breath of the Wild, when you reach a high point, unlike in the Assassin's Creed games where the map markers are immediately revealed, you need to manually uncover them. I really don't have many opinions on the open world structure to be honest, it's fine, it works, like almost every Ubisoft game there's too many map markers. Now... the story. Immortals Fenyx Rising's story is as generic as it gets, with characters that the story didn't remotely give you a reason to care about, and it's full of cliches. I didn't care about the story at all, and I feel like if it was better, the game itself would've benefitted a lot, considering other shortcomings. A lot of conversation around this game has been about the humor (Zeus and Prometheus are constantly talking back and forth throughout the game). A lot of people found it annoying. Personally, I didn't really care either way. On Xbox Series X, the game ran well, maintaining a solid 60 FPS throughout, although the screen tearing issue present in Valhalla was also an issue here, but far less frequent. I'm guessing it's an engine issue, but that might be completely false, I'm just guessing. One thing I will say is that compared to Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Immortals Fenyx Rising is much, MUCH more polished technically (I only had one crash and very few bugs in 32 hours). In conclusion, Immortals Fenyx Rising isn't a bad game, but also not really one I'd recommend over the absolutely massive amount of open world Ubisoft games (and Ubisoft-style open world games from other publishers) in the last 10 years or so. If you've played basically all of those games (including Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin's Creed Valhalla) and want more of that formula, then play Immortals Fenyx Rising. Otherwise, I'd recommend skipping this one. 6/10.