Early on, Immortals of Aveum gives the whole game away. During one of many, many expository scenes with General Kirkhan – played here by a committed Gina Torres, of Destiny 2 and Suits fame, who is if nothing else wonderfully game – you, the hero Jak, are told that you’re special. This is because you’re a Triarch, which is a kind of Magnus (Immortals of Aveum loves a proper noun, brace yourself), only better: while a regular magic wielder must commit themselves to one of three “colours” of magic – red, green, blue – a Triarch can tap into all three.
Immortals of Aveum reviewDeveloper: Ascendant StudiosPublisher: EA OriginalsPlatform: Played on PS5Availability: Out now on PC (Steam, Epic, EA), PS5, Xbox Series X/S.
The downside, Kirkhan tells you: you’ll never be as strong in any of them as a regular Magnus is to their committed colour. It’s hard to think of a game that sums up one of its biggest problems so succinctly. Amongst the various issues Immortals of Aveum has, one of the biggest is its central concept of being free to switch between its three schools – the freedom is a mirage. You have to switch, constantly, to defeat its very rigidly coded enemies and solve its rudimentary tricolour puzzles. And so the whole three-magics, three-weapons, three-skill trees thing is all a bit moot – you’re locked in from the off as a master of none.
Sadly, that’s also emblematic of Immortals of Aveum as a game. This is the everygame taken to another dimension. You are a wise-cracking kid with a maverick attitude thrown onto the frontline battlefield, you’re also a sort-of chosen one – special Triarch and all that – and you have a three-pronged skill tree with exciting upgrades like “+5 percent critical hit damage” and, , the ability to craft, collect, upgrade, and dismantle loot, despite this really feeling like it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to your efforts on the field.
If it sounds like I’m flying through this stuff, it’s because I really am. Explaining Immortals of Aveum feels a lot like playing it, in that it’s something I’ve done dozens and dozens of times before and all of those other times in at least slightly more interesting ways. It does have one sort-of twist, mind, which is its three-magics approach. This doesn’t really work, as I’ve already alluded to, but still. It is new and it is genuinely almost interesting.
In Immortals of Aveum you traverse the world right-arm raised, your entire limb permanently extended out in front of you like a frozen shoulder turned first-person shooter’s gun. Aveum is developed by the newly-formed Ascendant Studios, and it’s led by people with Call of Duty pedigree. In that sense you can feel it: shooting is your primary, almost only way to interact with Aveum’s world – you shoot chests to smash them open, and shoot little coloured shapes to solve puzzles, and shoot little coloured whisps for a little burst of something called something like Arcanium, which is XP but magic. From the off, you have three weapons – they’re called spells but they’re weapons – to shoot out of your gun-arm, and then within those three spells you can interchange your options like swapping one sidearm for another in the menu. So set your gun-arm to Red and you’ll be using vaguely angry feeling weapons, like a shotgun or grenade launcher; Green, the colour of “life and… the opposite to life”, is various forms of automatic weapon, from slow-charging mini-gun style projectiles to rapid-fire SMGs. Blue rhymes with pew-pew, and is therefore the colour of long-range pokey weapons, such as a DMR-alike and low fire-rate, high damage sniper equivalent (minus any kind of scope, mind).