Written by Patrick Orquia
Title: Immortals Fenyx Rising
Developer: Ubisoft Quebec
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Action, Adventure, RPG
Number of Players: 1
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 3 December 3, 2020
Price: $59.99
In 2017, Nintendo’s much-awaited The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild got released on the Wii U and the Nintendo Switch to universal acclaim. It was so good that it won numerous Game of the Year awards and currently sits on an outstanding 97 Metacritic rating. Near perfect score for a near perfect game. It set a new standard for all open world games, despite it being Nintendo’s first attempt at the genre, and it was only a matter of time for new games to try the new “open air” game design and mechanics that Breath of the Wild introduced.
Unlike Nintendo, Ubisoft is no stranger to open world games. In fact, they are one of the best-known developers of open world games, and are responsible for the very popular Assassin Creed and Far Cry game franchises. Nintendo also borrowed some of the elements of these games and incorporated them to Breath of the Wild. Ubisoft’s new game, Immortals Fenyx Rising, is out to out-Zelda Breath of the Wild by taking a spin with its own improvements to what made Nintendo’s masterpiece a well-loved game. But did the game really do it? Here’s my take.
Immortals Fenyx Rising (yeah, apparently, there is no colon in the name) is the retitled Gods and Monsters game that Ubisoft teased about a couple of years back. Why change it to its current name is a bewildering enigma, with some saying that the makers of Monster the energy tried to sue Ubisoft to prevent them from using the word monster, as if they own it. But I digress. The name is just a name, if the game plays well enough, it should not matter much. I heard that this game was supposed to be an offshoot from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, which is also about Greek mythology. I haven’t played that game, or any of the game in the franchise, but I heard that it was a good game. Thankfully, Ubisoft made Immortals Fenyx Rising a full-pledged game on its own, and we will probably see a sequel or more in the coming years, as the game has garnered quite a bit of praise itself.
Aside from its Assassin’s Creed roots, the game is also heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (with a dash of God of War combat mechanics). I apologize in advance for the frequent comparison of this game to that one throughout this review, but there is just no denying of the influence that Breath of the Wild has had on this game. From its use of cel-shaded art style to its open world mechanics to its gameplay, it could have been a Breath of the Wild sequel if Nintendo themselves published it. But out of such inspiration, Ubisoft did make a few tweaks here and there to make the game stand out on its own merits, and I must say, this is quite an excellent effort.
I did not get astonished by the game like Breath of the Wild did, but I still got surprisingly amazed by it. The changes to the new Zelda formula that Ubisoft made are, for the most part, really good, and this game has a surprising amount of satisfying content. But before we do a deep dive into the changes, let us begin with the story.
The game is based on Greek mythology, and it starts with the Titan Typhon escaping from Tartaros to seek vengeance against the Olympian gods. He starts with capturing the gods, taking away their essences, and transforming them to forms that make them unable to use their powers, like Aphrodite being transformed into a tree and Ares into a rooster. We get to see Zeus talking to the Titan Prometheus, who is chained to a rock as a penance for his crime of giving fire to mankind. Of course, Zeus chained him up there, but in the time of need, he seeks the assistance of Prometheus in fighting Typhon. Both know that they are on a losing battle, but Prometheus, having the gift of foresight, foresees a mortal being able to defeat Typhon. Zeus is doubtful about it, laughing at the thought of a mortal defeating a monster that the gods themselves cannot. But Prometheus went on with the story of how the mortal Fenyx rise from being a lowly shield bearer who got lost at sea to being able to free the gods and get their blessings as she go on an epic journey to restore the land of the gods from the clasp of Typhon. By the way, the near-endless bantering between Prometheus and Zeus serves as the game’s narration. Prometheus is the straight up serious narrator while Zeus is like a cool daddy-type character that will often quip zingers and funny commentary and anecdotes that complements well whatever Prometheus would be saying. You will get some cool tidbits of Greek mythology from the two all throughout the game and surely makes the adventure much more fun.
Speaking of fun, you play as Fenyx, and you get to customize the character as either male or female and give him/her look you want at the start of the game. You can customize the hairstyle, hair color, shape of eyes, color of the pupils, etc. I made mine a female, because women are not represented as much in video games. Girl Power! Anyway, you start with seeing Fenyx washed up on the shore. From there, the game will guide you on how to do the basic moves and attacks and whathaveyous. This does not end at just the opening area; the game will continuously provide you information and tutorials about different stuff as you encounter them, like new skills or abilities, NPCs, collectibles, etc. This is a sharp contrast from Breath of the Wild, where there is pretty much no handholding after you leave the Great Plateau. You follow main goals, one following another one, in sort of a linear fashion, but you can go out and explore your surroundings if you want to and try to learn stuff on your own. Your first main goal is to get a sword, and you get to have your brother’s, which got turned into a stone by Typhon along with everyone else. You then get to be introduced with the combat basics, such as attacking and dodging, and later on, you unlock additional skills and abilities to make you one badass fighting machine.
Combat in this game is really good, and I think it is one aspect that it has better than Breath of the Wild. Here, you have a light and heavy attack, light being the usual faster attack but does not hit as hard, and heavy being slower but hits harder. You have three types of weapons: swords, for light attacks; axes, for heavy attacks; and bow and arrow, for long range attacks, and also used for hitting switches, levers, etc. to solve challenges. There are different weapons and armor pieces that you can acquire in the game, mostly from opening chests or completing challenges. They vary in design and one interesting thing about them is that the weapons and armor pieces give you specific boons which you can mix and match depending on your play style or what you require for a particular challenge or boss fight. Also, weapons don’t break, so if you are not a fan of the durability mechanic in BotW, this is a welcome change.
Hitting enemies with heavy attacks fills up a stun meter on enemies, and when it goes full, they get stunned and unable to move and attack for a limited time, thus allowing you to go for the kill, or maybe hit them more to deplete their HP faster. Since the enemies will also attack you, you can either dodge them or parry their attacks. Doing a perfect dodge or parry momentarily slows down time, allowing you to go for a flurry rush, very similar to that on Breath of the Wild. Defeated enemies drop Adamantine Shards, one of the many collectibles in the game, which we will discuss later. If you think you cannot win on a battle, you can try to run away from the enemies until they stop pursuing you. Most enemies only stay at their designated areas, so you can either engage them or avoid them completely if you so wish.
Since the game is about Greek mythology, Ubisoft made sure to bring a whole barrage of mythological creatures in it. There are cyclopses, minotaurs, harpies, bears, boars, etc. The variety really keeps you on your toes, and as you level up in your skills and abilities, so do they. Some of them change colors to reflect that, like in Breath of the Wild, with higher hit points and attack. You also get to fight corrupted version of mythological heroes like Achilles, Atalanta, Herakles, and Odysseus. You will first encounter their wraith versions and will hunt you down from time to time until you seek out their lair and defeat them for good. You will also get to contend against legendary monsters like Medusa, Cerberos, the Hydra, and the list goes on.
In BotW, you have a very large map at your disposal, but there are large stretches of land where there are simply nothing to interact with. In this game, you get to encounter something interesting every few steps, may it be an enemy camp or a challenge or a combination of both. I personally like it a lot, but somehow I still like what BotW did a bit more, where pretty much nothing is marked on the map and you have to personally encounter whatever it is that you have to interact with and manually mark it on your map and remove it once you are done with it. The large patches of land with nothing much happening also gives a more contemplative exploration that highlights points of interest when you do encounter them. The Far Sight feature in this game just takes care of much of the fun of discovery for you and you can just pick and choose where to go next, but the density of the map can make the gameplay quite repetitive very quickly. Of course, using the Far Sight ability is optional, so if you want to go exploring blindly, you can very much do so.
Back to the statues: upon unlocking them, you get to progress through the story and you are tasked to free the gods by fulfilling a series of goals and missions in order to retrieve their essence. Once they get freed, they go back to the Hall of the Gods, which act as a central hub in the game. Here, you can talk to the gods for some quick and often humorous bantering or even receive some extra missions. You also receive the blessings of the gods you free, and these blessings are permanent boons, like a blessing from Aphrodite that makes you receive a full health bar when you fall in battle and thus preventing death or Athena’s bow damage upgrades. You need to free all the gods for you to gain enter to Tartaros, the final area of the game right smack in the middle of the map, where you go for a final battle against Typhon.
In the Halls of the God, you can also upgrade your skills and abilities. The aforementioned Adamantine Shards are used to upgrade your armor, weapons, number of arrows, and number of potions that you can carry. There are four different shards: Blue, Yellow, Red, and Purple, in order of rarity. You can obtain these shards mostly by defeating enemies and opening treasure chests. There are also some additional collectibles: the Coins of Charon, used in upgrading your skills and obtained from completing myth challenges; Golden Ambers, used in upgrading your potions and obtained from cutting down some trees and opening treasure chests; Ambrosia, used in upgrading your health pool and are scattered on the overworld, mostly on top of high places or guarded by monsters; and Zeus’s Lightning, used in upgrading your stamina pool and obtained by reaching the end of Vaults of Tartaros. You can also accept some game challenges also knows as Heroic Tasks, set by the god Hermes, with some of them only available within a limited time, and completing them earns you some of the collectibles mentioned above. Indeed, you will have plenty of things to do, whether you stick to just completing the main story goals or trying out some the side quests and missions.
Speaking of vaults, the Vaults of Tartaros is this game’s version of shrines found in Breath of the Wild. They play, look, and feel similarly to shrines, from the challenges, level design, and mechanics, but of course, Ubisoft did not copy them beat by beat. Most of these vaults are quite expansive, and the challenges within are quite good; some of them are really ingenious and will give you that eureka moment once you figure out what to do. Some of these vaults are necessary to progress in the story, as they may house certain bosses to beat or essences of gods that you are aiming to free. The vaults also have at least one extra treasure chest to open and once you have collected all the extra treasure chests or challenges within a vault, they close for good once you have completed it. And of course, they will serve as warp points on the map once you enter them. If you are unable to complete them right away, you can exit and return to it later.
Overall, Immortals Fenyx Rising is one very enjoyable game that did borrow a lot of game elements from Breath of the Wild and yet still made lots of changes and even improvements from the latter’s formula. This game has an almost overwhelming amount of content and you surely will have plenty of stuff to do at almost every turn on the map. Nintendo did borrow lots of game elements from other games themselves, including Ubisoft’s own franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, so I guess this game is a way of coming full circle. Nonetheless, the game is very commendable and should not be considered as just a Zelda clone. Nothing wrong for being a Zelda clone, because Zelda games are very good, and Breath of the Wild indeed set a new high standard in terms of overall quality and it is just a matter of time until the other game franchises take a shot at the formula. This game is one of the first ones, and though it is not as good as Breath of the Wild in overall quality, it still is pretty good and in some way can give Nintendo a run for its money. As you progress into the game and you upgrade Fenyx’s abilities and skills and have her equip the weapons and armor pieces that suit your play style and fashion sensibilities, the more you will appreciate the awesomeness of this game. I highly recommend this game to everyone, whether they are a fan of the action adventure genre or not. This game, despite some technical hiccups here in there in this Switch version, is really good and really deserves to be played. So raise your sword, put on your helm, and fly into an epic adventure, and go against the gods and monsters of old. May the gods bless you in your journey!
REPLAY VALUE: High
PROS
- Excellent cel-shaded art style and Greek mythology-inspired visuals
- Excellent music that captures the feel of ancient Greek civilization
- Excellent voice acting, despite the iffy accent that the actors used (I’m not sure if that is how the Greek accent is supposed to sound like)
- Superb gameplay that borrows heavily from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild but has enough difference and improvements to make the game stand on its own merits
- Lots of customization options, both for the game itself and the character you create
- Equipment can be further customized to look like other equipment, so if you don’t like what your preferred sword looks like, you can make it look like the cooler one
- Humorous dialogue between Zeus and Prometheus
- Being based on Greek mythology, the game has some variety of mythological monsters and heroes to contend with
- Satisfying Vaults of Tartaros challenges
- Offers different difficulty settings
- Future DLCs will add tons of new contents and story campaigns
- Plays great on both docked mode and handheld
- Very good use of HD Rumble
CONS
- Visuals look a bit muddy and lacking definition
- Character animation during cutscenes looks a bit off at times
- Unusual default control scheme that can take some time to get used to
- All buttons can be remapped, but there are no presets
- The decision to use alternate spellings of the Greek names (e.g. Atalanta for Atlanta, Cerberos for Cerberus, Tartaros for Tartarus, etc.) is a teeny-tiny bit jarring
- Long load times
- Infrequent yet annoying game crashes
- Floaty controls at times
- Video capture is disabled
RATING: 4.5/5 Gods and Monsters
No comments:
Post a Comment