Immortals Fenyx Rising - Review

When E3 2019 rolled around, I kept hearing about this game called Gods & Monsters, Because I was so busy at the show though I never got to see anything till afterwards and when I finally got a chance to watch the trailer and learn about the game I was very excited, now some 18 months later and the name change it's time to find out if the hype was real or if it was nothing more than a myth.

The story of Fenyx is actually told by Prometheus, the God that had been chained to a rock by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humans, and as it starts out the ship Fenyx was on, was caught in a massive storm and she was the only one to wash up on an island. Almost as soon as she arrives she notices that other members of the crew and other humans are now made of stone and as she is exploring she comes across the remains of her brother Ligyron, determined to find a way to reverse the curse, she sets out for a nearby temple. After discovering a prophecy, Fenyx heads to a place known as the Hall of the Gods, where she gets the full run down from Hermes, the god of thieves, messages and more. Typhon, one of the Titans, had broken free of the chains that bound him into captivity and with his new-found freedom, set about removing the gods from the world, Aphrodite, Ares, Athena and Hephaestus, at least the ones we get to deal with. In order to fight Typhon, the gods must be restored, but doing that is no simple task, as Fenyx quickly begins to discover.

While the story is mostly entertaining, thanks in part to the humorous dialogue between Zeus and Prometheus when it focuses on Fenyx it tends to fall way short. This isn't because Fenyx as a character is flawed or has problems, it's purely due to the fact that Phoenix is more like an overeager puppy. There were times when Fenyx gets told information and the responses more “Oh no what will we do”, then a half a pep talk later Fenyx is all about the objective and being positive, the speed at which Fenyx shifts around is hard to accept. The other issue with the story is that the four gods are all generic, and I don't mean in their look or their personalities, but when they have lost their essence they're not anything special. They simply inverted personas of what they normally would be, the example is Ares the God of War, is normally brash and bloodthirsty, no essence makes him a chicken, literally and it's the same with the others. They had the chance to do something fun with them and because they didn't by the time I got to the third god I honestly couldn't care about their personality shifts.

The other issue that the story has, happens in the end game and that is that there are two twist that come up that didn't need to be there, the first is honestly foreshadowed halfway through and is really easy to pick up, the second comes out of nowhere and didn't need to exist at all. Obviously I'm not going to say what these are because it will spoil things but the fact that they are in the game as critical elements is hard to comprehend especially when the second of the twists is very easy to see is a slot in element and not part of the cohesive narrative. The second twist that didn't need to be in the game is odd because they do try and foreshadow elements of it as the story plays out, but there is honestly nothing too special about those elements, on their own they worked, combined with the biggest story, they feel out of place.

On the gameplay side of things though there's a lot of good and some bad, but of course we really can't go any further without mentioning the fact that this game has taken a little inspiration from Breath of the Wild. Actually that's not correct it hasn't taken a little inspiration, it took the entire format and even though it copied everything it managed to not even reached the same height that the original game achieved. The world is broken up into six distinct zones and in order to uncover the map you need to climb up to a centralised location, very Assassin's Creed like, climbing up does not reveal all the icons on the map like other Ubisoft titles but Fenyx has an ability called far sight that allows full scanning of the environment. My issue with this is that the map can go from empty too very full, with just a few minutes of scanning and it loses the removes that desire of exploration, which is something that Breath of the Wild had in spades. For a while I was using the feature, however by the time I reached the second area I decided against activating it any further, because it took the fun out of exploring the world. Now that was only in relation to where items were located, for the monsters and the legendary beasts, they just live on the island those you had to find on your own and even towards the very end, there was always something fun and frightening about discovering a legendary beast sleeping where you wanted to go.

The combat in the game is broken down into light, heavy and ranged attacks, with each offering multiple upgrade options for skills and weapons, to sort of allow you to play in your own unique way. It's not full customisation because some enemies require a heavy attack in order to break through their shield and where some are quiet fast and you need the speed of the sword in order to strike, finding that perfect balance that suits your playstyle is not hard, but something you will want to do. Each of the enemies have multiple levels, as shown with the corruption and their health bars, the corruption is the part that makes them glow, red indicates low level, blue is higher and so on, again this is something the Breath of the Wild did. The more that you progress through the game and the more that you level up, the more high-level creatures you'll encounter, but it's not just the standard enemies, it's the legendary that you will find and that will test you. Finding some of them are actually connected to missions that the gods will send you on once you've managed to restore them , some of them are actually found just wandering the world and when you climb up a Cliff and encounter the Nemean lion it was one of those things where I just didn't expect that to be happening.

My issue with the core gameplay is that nothing felt solid, there's nothing inherently wrong with anything, but I just kept feeling like I've played this before. The Greek mythology theme helped alleviate some of that, but there were still aspects of the game that I felt kept reminding me that I wasn't playing Breath of the Wild no, matter how much the game felt like I was. One of the things that helped break that feeling were the puzzles, there are countless of them scattered around the world, from simple light a torch to unlock a chest puzzles, to the more complicated locate a half dozen orbs and place them in a specific pattern, in a central location to unlock a door. The puzzles themselves were fine, but a lot of the time I spent running around trying to locate an object that I needed, which was hard to locate, there was one particular puzzle where I needed to light a brazier, which wasn't that challenging a task, but it was locked, with the problem being that I needed to find a switch to turn it on. With this particular puzzle and countless others locating the specific item or trigger to remove the restrictions took more time to solve in the actual puzzle did, which is a bit odd.

Like I said there's nothing inherently wrong with the core gameplay, the problem is I've played it before, I had to deal with stamina while climbing a mountain side and put up with high level enemies showing up the further I got into the game. Even the rifts in Tartarus felt exactly like shrine puzzles, with a single element being the core of that particular rift and then making an appearance in a few others, even down to the few that is full of enemies you had to fight. The final rifts that you enter in order to retrieve the essence of a particular god, sort of brings a lot of elements together, but still ties everything to one central theme, for example Hephaestus is all about wind. Once you got in there you would encounter a boss fight and then retrieve the essence, nothing about them was wrong but again it ties back to I've played this before.

Taking a look at the presentation of the game this was one area that I really loved from the trailers and screenshots pride applying it and I'm happy to report that everything looked as good in action as it did there. Obviously with the Greek mythology being its core theme, there's a lot of pre-set notions that people are going to have going into it, Zeus having a beard, the minotaur having horns and things like that. The developers went the smart route, in not brandishing a brush that says we've redesigned every Greek element but putting their own spin on everything to make it stand out. A lot of the creature design comes from the myths and same with the God designs but with the visual aesthetic that they've selected everything looks unique and similar. It actually reminded me of Disney Infinity, in that series they were able to take characters from dozens of franchises with their own unique looks and yet make them appear as if they were always connected and that is what Ubisoft have managed to do here. The human characters or at least the human shaped characters, all have a Dreamworks style to them, so what the human characters in How to Train your Dragon look like, well not exactly that. The stylised look helps the game tell its story in a more engaging way then if it was just realistic and I liked it.

There are also dozens of little touches throughout the game that helped sell the world in ways I wasn't expecting, one example is that when you go into cutscenes the weapons and helmet that Fenyx has equipped will fade away with golden sparkles. this lets you then see the face of your character interacting with other people; there's no clipping of weapons through faces, or giant lion head helmets obscuring reactions and once the scene is done everything fades back in with that same effect. It's not just this that was a well thought idea as I said there were plenty of little touches that helped sell the world, for example there's a lot of debris that floats in the windier areas, as you approach the shoreline you'll hear waves crashing and of course when the wraiths start to hunt you the world loses its vibrancy and becomes a darker place to help sell bad effect of imminent pain.

The audio side is actually really well done as well because all the characters sound Greek, which I know is a bit of a weird thing to praise, but this is a Greek story so having characters sound American would just be completely out of place. The only weird voice work is Typhon, which is a shame because as the primary antagonist you would hope that that would be a clear voice, the problem is there are times when the voice becomes heavy and it's harder to understand what is being said and other times it just sounds like he has a lisp. there's just a lack of consistency in the voice work there which hinders the threatening manner that he tries to portray and as Typhon pops up consistently to tell you your fail or something else not being able to quite understand what's being said causes the character to lose impact.

On the score side of things there are a lot of tracks that are beautiful and I did find myself stopping and just enjoying the music quite a few times, which is something that's a bit of a rare thing in games these days. All the gods have their own unique theme, that when you interact with them you'll hear it playing in the background which is a welcome touch. There were a few odd bugs with the score however and mostly came down to it just not knowing when to stop, there were a few times when I was doing the Hermes race challenges, but even when the event was completed the music still played. Another instance was when using far sight, when you locate a rift, a menacing short 10 second piece of music plays to indicate this is a dangerous thing you've discovered, there are few times where that just looped for a good minute or so. When this happened I would just warp to the nearest fast travel location and the game would sort itself out but it was a little annoying that I had to do that.

Immortals Fenyx Rising is an ok game, it's not bad but it's also not great, the more I learned about it leading up to release the more I kept thinking this is Ubisoft’s Breath of the Wild and I don't mean in that re-defined as genre. The core combat is solid and provide a lot of challenge, but as it's likely to be far more difficult than most people are expecting I suspect they'll drop it down a level or two in order to be able to survive. The world and the puzzles and the shrines, I mean rifts, constantly reinforced the feeling that I was playing Breath of the Wild but at the same time the overall theme said that I wasn't and it's an odd feeling to try and come to terms with. As someone who adores the Greek mythology I loved the interaction with the different gods and the legendary beasts, but a story that is predictable and bookended by a plot twist that didn't need to be there, takes some of the fun out things. For anyone who hasn’t play Breath of the Wild or is looking for a more light-hearted take on the Greek mythos, then this game will serve you well, for the rest, temper expectations.