Read Part 1 of this series here
Don’t believe the humorous killjoys of the review-industrial-complex who tell you that Immortals: Fenyx Rising is annoying. This game is legitimately hilarious and is a breath of… fresh air in a AAA landscape that mostly hews towards gruff seriousness. The story is told as an argument/conversation between Zeus and Prometheus while a guy named Typhon who looks like Surtur with a Cthulu arm attacks the Gods of Olympus. They interrupt each other. They correct each other, changing the story as it happens. There is even a dumb (but very well-timed) gag about big bosses kicking your ass at the beginning of a video game. And there is a stoner oracle who wonders allowed like, yo dude, do you think they call it sand because it’s between the sea and the land?
This game did not take very long to win me over, and not just because of the sunk-cost fallacy of paying the $60 AAA game toll.
There aren’t an infinite amount of character customisation options, but there are a number of them, and somehow even the character customisation process is hilarious. I almost went with green hair that was “the color of Poseidon’s vomit,” according to Zeus. You’ve got all the basics for a game like this: genders, hair colors, and a couple of different faces. This isn’t Cyberpunk 2077, but it’s definitely something. After going with a look similar to Aloy from Horizon: Zero Dawn, I was let loose to meet a strange blonde thief and figure out the basics of combat.
Let me preface this by noting that I haven’t played any of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed games in many years and thus can’t comment on how similar/dissimilar the combat of Immortals is to the hacks and slashes of that franchise. Attacks are all mapped to the shoulder buttons, which felt weird to me at first as a guy who mostly plays indies and Nintendo games. I spent a fair amount of my first few hours getting my ass shattered by wild boars until being faced with some fights in Vaults of Tartaros (Immortals equivalents of the shrines in that other game that Immortals totally isn’t based on) that forced me to fight properly.
About three hours in I found out that the strange thief who guided me around the first area of the game was none other than Hermes (the God, not the fashion designer). Cue title card: Immortals: Fenyx Rising.
It sounds like there’s a lot of plot front loaded into Immortals: Fenyx Rising because there is. I didn’t mind this so much because I found a lot of the dialogue and Greek mythological references hilarious. The gameplay itself is quite fun and fluid but I’m writing this at the outset and haven’t really delved into the depths of that yet. There are new moves and upgrades to old moves to unlock, potions to craft, and even seemingly the ability to change your character’s appearance at any point in the game, but I haven’t done any of these things yet. If the first few hours are any indication, however, it seems as though Immortals was worth the purchase.