Oh, Ubisoft, can you just make a good game a good game and not ruin it for a while?.. Immortals Fenyx Rising is a Greek mythology based action adventure in an open world that attempts to marry The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the Assassin’s Creed formula from Origins to today. And the concept is genuinely solid as are the basics, but… Well. It’s Ubisoft, so despite liking the game a lot, I’m writing this exhausted and after deciding not to play the DLCs.
To get it out of the way first – I have not played Breath of the Wild yet myself. I’ve not found Switch comfortable enough to own or even borrow, so I’ve avoided that title and, if I’m going to be honest to myself – I doubt that I will like it that much. The promise of a completely free open map with no little handholding, systemic approach to design sounds both impressive and also super boring to me. I just tend to prefer more guided titles, even if they leave a lot of freedom to what I can do, I just don’t particularly care about games that want me to wander around and find entertainment for myself.
That’s one of the reasons why I thought Immortals Fenyx Rising might click with me – it’s a far more guided experience. To the point where it’s a more traditionally story-driven game. It has a lot of similar basics as BotW, but most of the systems are simplified and you get a lot of what you expect to find in a modern AC instead. So, unlike BotW, it’s not a question of – you can fight the final boss from the start, it’s just going to be stupid hard unless you get better gear and upgrades by doing the rest of the game. It’s more of a – you can do most of the game in any order, but you cannot get to the ending without going through all linear story arcs.
And I’m mostly fine with that. The story is… I’m sure a lot of people will roll their eyes at the approach to writing in this game, as it basically takes the Ancient Greek mythology and tells it as a fourth-wall breaking somewhat anachronistic “modern” story, with social media lingo and memes included. But it manages to do it well enough to not sound like “how do you do, fellow kids”, and on top of that the underlying story is good and the voice acting performances are fun.
Plus it doesn’t usually get in the way of gameplay, which (unlike AC games) is more central here. As mentioned, it’s far closer to modern AC, so while you do get limited stamina, just like in BotW, the climbing itself is basically lifted from Odyssey as is. And you don’t get any additional systemic elements on top of that – there are no rains to make things slippery or lightning to strike metallic things or anything like that. But still, just adding stamina, making the world full of small and bigger puzzles that are fun to solve and which are very varied, makes the game feel entirely unlike modern AC titles and, gameplay-wise, much more interesting (speaking of – I also tried to play Valhalla immediately after and it became the first AC title I stopped playing – it was that boring).
But then they Ubisofted all over the map with Stuff To Do. As mentioned – I’ve not played BotW myself and neither did I watch anyone ever 100% it. But finding treasures and solving optional puzzles in Immortals feels very un-Zelda and extremely Ubisoft. There’s just way too much crap, most of it is useless (no really, most of the rewards are just skins for equipment), simple upgrade materials are measured in thousands just so you must get more of them… The quality of a lot of puzzles and puzzle dungeons suffers greatly from it too. Like – for example, there’s a fun little one-off puzzle dungeon which suddenly turns the game into pinball. Fun and unexpected, but it’s so unrefined and random that instead of having fun, you’ll be wasting several dozens of minutes trying to achieve the goal the game set because everything is slow and random. That, or do it very quickly because again – totally random. And it’s just one example among dozens of icons on the map screen you’ll get if you mark them (you can decide not to mark them, though).
And if the game had about half of it simply cut while the rest better refined, I’d be singing praises for the game right now. Well, no, first I’d be playing DLCs that I, otherwise, just had no patience for right now, then singing praises. Instead, I consciously understand that I’ve enjoyed the game and I love what they were doing here. But also I don’t want to play it anymore.
Then again, it’s not the only thing cooling my excitement. Despite clearly being a lower budget (not as low budget as poor Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands got, mind you), Ubisoft wanted to double dip hard into this release, so the store and microtransactions are pushed hard down your throat from the start… Even though all of them are purely decorative. The Steam release is also clearly a throwaway thing for the company as they didn’t even bother to make a proper compatibility check for Steam Controller system, so without additional (if simple) tweaks, the game won’t properly work for you. It also loads super slowly, because it “checks for additional content” every time you have to get into main menu for about half a minute. And after you close the game, Ubisoft Connect (ex-Uplay) throws a million errors at you. Just – no care for the title whatsoever.
It’s a real shame, because I did like this game. And I would’ve liked it much much more, and maybe the DLCs too, if it knew when to stop and not Ubisoft its pants. But no, sadly it does the exact same mistakes all recent Ubisoft titles do. I’d say – it’s still worth checking out. It’s fun, funny, with some good puzzles, descent combat… And it feels more fresh than what you usually expect from the developers. Plus, this feels like a passion project, reminding me of how exciting Origins felt. Like all of the nerdy fun things the team learned from Ancient Greece research finally could be shared with the world, because it sure as hell wasn’t in Odyssey which was just sterile and boring in comparison. But do expect it to get stale and you stopping playing it not because you finished it, but because you got bored.