When it comes to gritty realism in a fantasy setting, peoples’ thoughts typically turn to the low or high fantasy works of medieval governments or mystical artifacts. Bringing a fireball to a gunfight isn’t typically at the top of the list, especially when it’s in the likes of your Battlefields or Call of Duty’s. Ascendant Studios aims to change that with their upcoming EA Original Immortals of Aveum and we had one of the first open demos of the magical FPS during Summer Game Fest.
Immortals of Aveum opens with players assuming the role of Jak, a low ranking grunt whose first missions see him diving directly into the field of combat while his commanding officer barks the usual generic banter and orders players have heard a hundred times across other FPS campaigns. Jak similarly has the usual one-liners and the expressive dialogue of any high-and-tight wearing protagonist of the past decade. Swap the magical vambrace for an M16 and you’ve got the typical action hero on your hands. If nothing else, Jak’s character comes as a detriment to the narrative and pushes the fact that perhaps Immortals of Aveum really is just another dudebro shooter despite the novel presence. I’m willing to stand corrected and experience a narrative that grows far above and beyond the genre’s roots into something that properly fits into the fantasy world Ascendant Studios has built.
Obviously what sets Immortals of Aveum apart from any regular shooter campaign is the inclusion of spellcraft and the high fantasy setting. Of the three basic spell schools available to the player as the campaign begins, each functions adjacent to a firearm of similar caliber. The blue-imbued magic functions as a semi-automatic battle rifle with a first at each tap of the trigger, while the green and red spells are your machine gun and shotgun in essence. Granted, this is just at the very beginning of the game and only a mission or two before Jak comes out as a Triarch, an up-and-coming Magnus that can control all three elements while most seasoned mages can only cast a single color. It’s this unique powerset that gives him a leg-up and while he’s just the lowest rank of grunt being sent on death missions early on, there’s the potential to see him grow in his role as the only Triarch in the Immortals, which lends credence to seeing him assume the role of high commander (usually by way of his commanding officer’s sudden and revenge-demanding death) by journey’s end if Immortals of Aveum follows the typical military shooter tropes.
Expect a lot of swapping as each magic crystal is depleted and needing to ‘reload’ just as much as when you need to rotate out between short- and long-distance encounters. The developer that offered the occasional guidance to my play session advised that there’s no form of ADS to zoom in on the enemy because their answer is using a Bulletstorm-adjacent lash to pull enemies closer to Jak’s face. With the hooks of platforming and some like Metroid Prime-esque exploration and backtracking, I wholly expect the game to feature many more uses for the lash in the full title.
When the action keeps up with the player, Immortals of Aveum is both a spectacle to watch and fluid to play, in part to do with the title running on Unreal Engine 5. Illumination and particle effects shine light on the battlefields and Jak feels like a badass when swapping between magic schols and the Fury skills that serve as powerful abilities on cooldown timers. The slower paced moments when players need to hold back to recover their strength or strike down minibosses and face repeated death when the player can’t dash out of harm’s way or eat a fireball that could’ve otherwise been avoided each hinder the flow to Immortals of Aveum and comes down to the skill of the player and campaign difficulty together.
Coming from someone that frequently plays Call of Duty campaigns on Veteran the first run-through, I’m quite used to having to die and restart quite frequently. Immortals of Aveum didn’t prove much of a challenge up until the dragon boss that served as the final challenge to the playable session. Close to a dozen tries finally resulted in victory but not without a variety of deaths from shockwave attacks and well-telegraphed moves that I just simply wasn’t paying enough attention to in order to avoid, or had my evasive maneuvers on cooldown and simply couldn’t avoid the damage in more than one instance.
Run-and-gun campaigns never get old for me and the premise of light RPG mechanics for skill tree progression coupled with exploration are two things that scratch a particular itch I have these days. Whether Immortals of Aveum can continue to distance itself from being another bog standard shooter campaign during its 25-plus hour campaign remains to be seen, but I’m eager to get back into the swing of things the next chance I can get.
Immortals of Aveum will be released for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X on August 22nd, following a one-month delay from its previous July 20th date. For more on the game, read our exclusive interview with Ascendant Studios Executive Producer Kevin Boyle.
