Immortals of Aveum: The Final Preview

ign.com:

I love first-person shooters. Always have. Always will. And in particular I love single-player first-person shooters. Mix a compelling narrative in with some great set pieces and repeatable fun gameplay that makes me feel powerful in some way and I’m all-in. I also love something that feels fresh and new, which is harder to come by in this expensive-to-build, risk-averse genre. That’s why I was intrigued to spend a few hours playing Immortals of Aveum, whose Mad Libs-sounding name belies a great idea I haven’t seen in an FPS in a while: it has zero guns in it. By now you’ve already seen that magic takes its place. It’s a smart choice that allows plenty of depth and variety between its three magic types, and the result thus far is a game that mostly had me smiling the entire time I played.

I say “mostly” because, well, let me get Aveum’s big blemish out of the way now: its dialogue and main character are not good. You play as Jak, a generic cocky rookie who has developed the rare ability in this universe to wield all three types of magic: red, blue, and green. Neither Jak nor the words that come out of his mouth match the tone of this fantasy universe at all. Maybe this was on purpose to try and avoid being Yet Another Fantasy Game, but it just doesn’t work. I’m not looking forward to an entire campaign’s worth of Jak’s cringey dialogue with his superior officers in their Everwar against The Bad Guy.

Fortunately, that downside seems to be drastically outweighed by the good stuff in Aveum: namely, its combat and its visuals. I’ll start with the former. While it’s true that the tri-color magic-spell combat at times mirrors a traditional firearm – like the green-magic spell that is functionally all but identical to a minigun