Immortals of Aveum Disappoints as Unreal Engine 5’s True Debut

wccftech.com:

Immortals of Aveum is out now, roughly a month after its original release date of July 20th. Developer Ascendant Studios, which debuts in the industry with this first-person sci-fantasy shooter game, had cited the need to polish it further when it delayed the product to August 22nd.  I'm afraid the game would have needed much more than that, at least on a technical level.

Immortals of Aveum can be considered to be the true debut in a triple-A game of Epic's Unreal Engine 5 technology. Sure, Coffee Stain Studios updated its factory simulation game Satisfactory to UE5 with Nanite and optional Lumen support, and Anshar/Bloober released the Layers of Fear remake with Lumen support.

However, Ascendant's game is the first one to make abundant use of both Nanite and Lumen, not to mention other Unreal Engine 5.1 technologies like Niagara, Streaming Virtual Texturing, World Partition, and One File Per Actor. In a recent blog post, the studio praised how all these features helped them while creating Immortals of Aveum:

The thing about all these different tools, though, is that no single one of them is responsible for making Immortals of Aveum look as good as it does while running as well as it does. The magic isn’t just in any single part of Unreal Engine 5.1, but in how these tools all work together, and how the whole engine provides a degree of flexibility and modularity that hasn’t been possible before now. It’s given us the ability to create a huge game in a vast world with a relatively small team, and make it all look great and run well—on a wide variety of platforms.

The thing is, the game doesn't run well at all, even on a high-end PC. On top of that, it doesn't always look great enough to justify that somehow. Lumen's