Immortals Fenyx Rising is the best game that publisher Ubisoft released this year, despite being shoved into the holiday season behind its bigger siblings, Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Developer Ubisoft Quebec pivoted from Assassin’s Creed’s massive quest to a shorter action-adventure game, a move that helps this story of Greek gods and monsters shine brighter. Immortals Fenyx Rising is a PC game forged from the pieces of other titles, notably Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but it excellently establishes its own identity.
The Bards Tell a Tale
Immortals Fenyx Rising drops you into the sandals of Fenyx, a shieldbearer and storyteller in an unnamed Greek army. When a storm wrecks Fenyx’s ship, the hero is left shipwrecked on the Golden Isle, the home of the Greek pantheon. Unfortunately, things aren’t well. The Titan Tython has broken free of his imprisonment, turning humanity into stone statues and trapping the gods in lesser forms.
The only one to escape the carnage is Zeus, who is played here as haughty and selfish, in keeping with the old stories. The Father of the Gods pours his heart out to Prometheus, who was imprisoned by Zeus for bringing fire to humanity. As such, Fenyx’s tale plays out as a story that Prometheus tells in real-time, with Zeus’ added snide commentary. Prometheus is the straight man, while Zeus is the wise-cracking con man.
It is…a definite choice. Sadly, Zeus’ humor isn’t all that great. The jokes are one note at best, in the style of animated films like Antz, A Shark’s Tale, or Minions. They aren’t particularly clever; you’ll roll your eyes as Zeus makes easy jokes about the isle of Lesbos. That said, the humor hammers home his immaturity, but having a story reason doesn’t make it less annoying. Luckily, the conversation fades into the background as you dive deeper into Immortals.
The rest of the cast fares a little better. Prometheus carries a good deal of weight in his narration, and the other gods you free are all empathetic. Fenyx doesn’t just return their godly powers, but also their comfort in who they are as beings. Their stories are endearing, if a bit pat, and I think without the wild tonal shifts of Zeus’ interjections, Immortals would come off better in the story department. See Supergiant Games’ Hades for a better distillation of Greek mythology.
Take a Breath
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal,” says the old adage attributed to Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, and other visionaries over the decades. It’s not hard to look at Immortals Fenyx Rising and see the ghost of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The engine and world design is from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but the stamina meter, climbing, and gliding all recall the recent Zelda adventure. The Tartarus’ pocket dimensions, where many of Immortals’ puzzles reside, seem directly cast in the mold of Breath of the Wild’s shrines. Even the basic scope of your journey—freeing four mythical figures and gaining their powers—smacks of what Nintendo did in 2017.
The difference is that Breath of the Wild was focused wholly on the idea and feeling of exploration. Link was thrust into the ruined world of Hyrule, and set free to find his way forward. You were meant to cast your eyes towards a distant mountain and slowly make their way there, finding interesting nooks and curios along the way.
Immortals doesn’t particularly care about that. You’ll scale the huge statues of each region’s signature god and gaze down upon the landscape below, but that’s more to give you a general lay of the land. You can drop pins on certain areas from this vantage point, but Fenyx’s Far Sight ability easily pinpoints new challenges and puzzles across the world below. If you want to go without Far Sight, you can, but even gliding across the Golden Isle on the Wings of Daidalos reveals chest icons, movement challenges, and Vaults of Tartarus when you get close to them. This is Immortals’ focus: always having another chest to open or movement challenge to undertake. It’s about the gameplay, not the exploration.
That said, the gameplay is good. Immortals starts with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s dodge-and-parry combat system, with heavy attacks and perfect parries putting enemies into a stun state. While foes are in this state, Fenyx does additional damage, so most of your encounters are focused on stunning foes as soon as possible. Being able to step away from any feeling of realism helps, with additional magic abilities that let you pull enemies towards you or bounce them into the air with a sea of rising spears. The combat is snappy, but Fenyx retains mostly the same abilities from the beginning of the game to the end. The combat variety comes mostly from battling the different enemies thrown your way, rather than gaining vast, new abilities.
The challenges that dot the landscape aren’t just about combat, though. Some challenges test your bow skills by tasking you with guiding arrows through a series of targets; others demand you slide blocks to complete a picture. Within the disconnected Vaults, these puzzles get more complex, relying on jumping and flying precision to succeed. The challenges contain hidden chests and rewards, requiring a keen eye and deft movements to obtain. Immortals will test you; expect to miss a jump and fall into the Void, or see a box that you shepherded through a series of lasers get torn to shreds because you rushed right before making it to the finish line.
You can tell Ubisoft Quebec had a ton of fun making up these puzzles and situations for you to overcome. It’s actually one of the areas where Immortals surpasses Breath of the Wild. Immortals has some of the better platforming experiences I’ve played in some time, especially if you hunt for the harder gameplay paths. The puzzles and challenges feed into Fenyx’s overall progression, with everything you find being useful in unlocking new skills or raising your health and stamina.
It’s not all sunshine in the Golden Isle, though. The pinpoint nature of some jumps isn’t helped by Fenyx’s animations. For example, one difficult Vault path required that I jump onto small platforms floating above the Void. Unfortunately, Fenyx would occasionally enter an odd animation after landing, causing the hero to take a few extra steps. As a result, I’d hit the platform, but step right into the void. It’s frustrating to say the least.
Another gripe: Puzzles found in the open world need more signposting. The open-world puzzles have a variable area of operation, so sometimes I found myself wandering around for 5-10 minutes trying to figure out what I needed to interact with. Is this rock needed for this puzzle? Where’s the final target? There’s a puzzle in Aphrodite’s palace that I couldn’t solve, because I couldn’t figure out what a particular switch was designed to activate.
Aphrodite’s Beauty
If there’s one thing Ubisoft knows how to do, it’s building environments. The Golden Isle is no different, with its exception being that it’s completely untethered from reality. This means Ubisoft’s artists were free to swing for the fences, creating giant forges and aqueducts in Hephaistos’ Forgelands and the bright, pink-and-green forests of Aphrodite’s Valley of Eternal Spring. There are moments where the light hits just right and cements Immortals as one of 2020’s best-looking games. Ubisoft knows this, as illustrated by the view from the Hall of Gods, where you can see all the regions in a single glance. The studio wanted to say, “This is what our artists are capable of,” and it’s impressive to say the least.
There’s also a good deal of visual customization available to you. By default, Fenyx is a young woman with red hair and dark skin, but you can change the character’s gender and physical appearance at any time. There’s even blue and green skin color options if you really want to get weird.
Unlike Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Immortals Fenyx Rising doesn’t lock you into a specific piece of armor, as gear progression is inherent to your custom Fenyx. Each piece of gear has its own perks. One sword gives you a health boost as you kill an enemy, while another increases damage on a perfect parry. You unlock more damage and perk tiers within Fenyx, so once you’ve unlocked Tier 2 in light attacks, for example, you gain those benefits for all swords. It’s an elegant system that lets you swap gear as needed.
Can Your PC Run Immortals Fenyx Rising?
Immortals Fenyx Rising is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, and Nintendo Switch. I played it on PC via Ubisoft Connect, the new moniker of Ubisoft’s Uplay platform. Ubisoft Connect supports cross-save, which let me jump back and forth between PC and Switch. Very nice.
The recommended specs come in a variety of levels. For “High Settings,” which is 60 frames per second at 1080p resolution, the game demands an Intel Core i7-6700/AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD RX Vega 56 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 26GB of space on your SSD. My gaming desktop houses an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, a Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, and 32GB of RAM.
The rig pushed polygons at 60fps, but the breathtaking word view from the aforementioned Hall of the Gods caused the frame rate to dip to 45fps. If your PC’s struggling to run Immortals at a consistent frame rate, there are options for adaptive resolution, frame rate locks, and G-Sync/FreeSync.
A New God Rises
If you’re coming into Immortals Fenyx Rising looking for the next big thing, the next innovation in gaming, you’ll be disappointed. This is a fun, great-looking title that starts with the foundations established by Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and moves in a different direction. This is about platforming, combat, and puzzles, not exploration.
It’s not a mere Breath of the Wild clone, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Dark Souls’ existence doesn’t make Nioh or The Surge bad; they do different things that build on the same foundation. And a tight platformer like Super Mario Odyssey doesn’t diminish Yooka-Laylee or A Hat in Time. Likewise, Immortal Fenyx Rising can live just fine in Breath of the Wild’s shadow.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is worth your time, with its deep customization, satisfying action, and challenging puzzles. Along with being a fantastic game, it’s an intriguing concept that presents a fascinating potential future for its publisher. I’d like to see Ubisoft return to the Immortals universe, and dabble in more smaller experiments, overall.
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