Video Game Review: Immortals: Fenyx Rising

On a distant island which is home to the gods of Olympus, a young shieldbearer named Fenyx awakes, washed ashore after a horrible shipwreck. They are alive, but not safe. Monsters roam the island, the gods are nowhere to be found, and everyone they know has been turned to stone. Typhon, the father of monsters, has broken free from his imprisonment, and intends to destroy the world to remake it in his own image. It's up to Fenyx to rescue the gods, defeat Typhon, and save Hyrule -- ah, I mean, the Golden Isle!

Okay, yeah, let's get this out of the way. It's Breath of the Wild. Absolutely and totally. That is what this game is. It's Breath of the Wild, as made by Ubisoft. From game mechanics to art direction, there is no area in which this game doesn't completely ape off of Breath of the Wild. That on its own isn't necessarily bad. People still enjoyed Quake and Doom despite them being basically just level packs for Wolfenstein 3D. More relevant to this, most people have been fairly positive about fellow Breath-clone Genshin Impact.

In fact...

Gameplay

I'll start here because I want to say right off that there are two areas where I actually give points to Fenyx Rising over Breath of the Wild. Number one, your weapons don't break. Number two, and this is going to sound weird but bear with me: it's not a Zelda game. Not because I dislike Zelda, I love it, and that was the problem. My one major complaint that I always had about Breath was that it was a Zelda game without dungeons. It had the shrines, yes, but I'm talking about real dungeons. Ocarina of Time style dungeons. You just can't have Zelda without dungeons. I spent all of Breath of the Wild waiting for the dungeons to appear and I was always disappointed that they didn't. Divorcing the game from the Zelda franchise made that more palatable.

All of that being said, Immortals: Fenyx Rising does not put its best foot forward in gameplay.

For one, looting isn't very fun for me in this game. Weapons and armor aren't particularly interesting here. They don't have different stats, only different perks, none of which seem very useful to me. Also, looting to unlock new color variants for weapons and armor, as opposed to actually unlocking new weapons and armor and then getting to dye them myself if I want to like in Breath, feels really lame.

And now for the more serious complaint...

I'll be honest, I only half enjoy physics puzzles as it is. I'm not really a fan of this genre where I can figure out your fairly basic puzzle in a few seconds, but then fail 30 times anyway because Ian Malcolm was wrong. It gets worse when the physics puzzles are full of bugs. Oh yeah, this game is a buggy mess.

To give you an idea of what I mean, I spent almost a half an hour on one puzzle because it was broken. The puzzle itself was pretty obvious. I had to flip a switch, which caused a wooden ball to spawn, which gets blown by some wind jets over to a platform. I have to run and jump to reach the platform and grab the ball before it rolls away into the abyss. But I can't... because the physics engine bugged out and the ball doesn't make it all the way to the platform. It's obvious that it's supposed to, but it doesn't. Except sometimes it does, and I only ended up getting it after a half an hour because I finally got lucky and it actually hit the jet right, allowing me to move on.

That's only one example of many. Sometimes, as in that example, jets wouldn't push stuff as hard as they should. Sometimes physics objects would spawn inside the floor, or not spawn at all. It got to a point where I could never be quite sure if I was failing to figure out a puzzle, or if the game had bugged out again.

Also, it crashes a lot.

The game does actually work at least, not because there's no bugs or that the bugs aren't serious, but because there's at least workarounds for it. Saving and reloading will reset puzzles and fix the physics, and the game's constant autosaves mean that you never lose much when it crashes. Also, the game is generally pretty fun to play when it is working. I mean, it's Breath of the Wild without weapon breakage. Of course it's fun.

Please note, however, that's not me saying it's all fine. "At least there's workarounds" is not something you want me to say about your game. That's like saying at least you gave me a band-aid for the gaping head wound you left me with.

Rating: 3/5 - Fun to play, less fun to loot, full of bugs.

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Presentation

I almost don't even feel fair rating presentation. I'm basically just rating Breath of the Wild here. It's the exact same stylized "3D cartoon" style of artwork. It's nice, but I've seen it before is what I'm saying.

I don't really get why. I mean, aside from the obvious answer of "because BotW did it". Ubisoft has their own style already, and people like it. In fact, according to the developers, they got the idea for this game after a glitch in Assassin's Creed Odyssey turned the sailors into cyclopes and they decided they wanted to see a fantasy-themed Assassin's Creed game... so why not make that? Why not give us your realistic designs except now with grotesque monsters? I know you're ripping off Breath of the Wild and I accept that, but you can at least do one thing of your own, right?

Well, at least it does look pretty. Also, you can select your weapon and armor, and then select their appearance separately, meaning you can play with the perks you want and the look you want too, which is definitely nice. I'm still taking off a point because I don't like the weapon and armor designs, though.

What? You already knew I was an asshole.

Rating: 4/5 - Can't put Fenyx in the Gerudo outfit, 2/10 stars.

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Story:

In this case, there's two things I want to talk about. The first is the writing, which I actually enjoyed. I know this isn't the case for everyone, but Fenyx Rising's sense of humor is actually right up my alley, at least most of the time. I appreciated the witty observations on Greek mythology, and I found the Wise Guy/Straight Man dynamic of Zeus and Prometheus to be pretty fun. There were a few times where it got a bit too over the top, and some jokes that fell flat, but also a lot of times that made me seriously laugh out loud.

Even with that being the case, though, there were also definitely times when I wished that Zeus and Prometheus would just shut the hell up and let me enjoy the game in peace. I actually liked the humor and it still got old for me. If you don't even like the humor to begin with, you will hate this game.

And that said... it's time to climb into the cesspool...

The big problem with the story is that we're obviously supposed to be on the gods' side, but the game never manages to successfully convince me of why I should be. To quote Roger Ebert, "you can't have heroes and villains when the wrong side is making the best sense." Typhon's entire raison d'etre is that the gods are trash and bad for mortals and he intends to take their place. While he might not be much better than they are, everything he says about them is right. Even if you don't already know the myths and you're only speaking in the context of the game, it also doesn't shy away from it and in fact plays up the gods' assholery so much that it's impossible to sympathize with them.

And yes, for a slight spoiler you probably saw coming anyway, the gods eventually realize they were jerks and promise to be better by the end of the game... but so what? Look, I believe in second chances as much as the next guy. You need to have second chances, otherwise you might as well just give up and become a serial killer the first time you make a mistake, because you're done anyway. But the Greek gods are not the best choice to use for this allegory. If anything, they make a better allegory for why you should never give anyone any chance ever.

It's one thing to argue for a second chance for a petty criminal or a jerk jock, it's another thing to argue for a second chance for a genocidal psychopath. Just go Kratos on their asses and call it a day. You can't spend your entire game casually joking about the time this character turned into a pig so he could rape a woman, and then murdered her entire family to cover it up, and then expect me to want that character to have a happy ending. In fact, no, you know what? You can't spend your entire game casually joking about rape and murder. What the actual fuck is wrong with you, Ubisoft Quebec?

Rating: 1/5 - #TyphonWasRight

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I'll admit I did have fun playing the game. It's not terrible, but it's got way too many flaws for me to call it really good. The worst part of it is the story, and that's such a big part that I can't just ignore it and focus on the gameplay, not when Zeus and Prometheus are going to chime in every time I even look at a new puzzle. So, overall...

MEDIOCRE

PROS:	CONS:
+ Pretty fun to play, when it works.	- A buggy mess that crashes and glitches out constantly.
+ Fairly witty dialog if you're into this style of humor.	- If you're not into this style of humor, then...
+ No weapon breaking.	- Constant commentary ruins immersion.
	- Trashy story about trashy people being trashy and getting away with it.
	- Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact both already did it better.