Every once in a while, I find myself not jiving with popular games. Minecraft is tedious, Fortnite is loud and obnoxious kiddie dancing, and I've given a whole 20 hours to trying to like Breath of the Wild and failed. Apologies if you've heard this before, but there's just way too much maintenance and not enough action and gameplay for me. The world is barren and everything's too hard. So, when Ubisoft spit out this split-generation Immortals: Fenyx Rising, people were quick to name it a BotW clone. I am so glad I was hard up for PS5 titles and bought this at half-price.
Like Ubisoft's bread-and-butter titles, it's part of the oversaturated game type: sandbox with a main story and side-quests and various tasks in a big map. Every time I open my mouth to complain about this type of game, I look down at the controller and realize I'm enjoying some title built on this model! Part of the reason it's considered a BotW clone is that a lot of the puzzles in the outworld and inside the 40-odd dungeons can be solved in multiple ways. Common things are navigating or carrying a weight to a pressure plate, getting to a ledge that's out of reach from your double jump, dodging lasers or hitting switches in a certain pattern to open a door. The part that's up to you is hidden ledges that in turn give you access to shortcuts, abilities that let you create your own weights, and attacks that have jumping animations. However, Fenyx needs to balance all abilities and jumps with his/her stamina gauge.
I say "his/her" because Fenyx, your character, is customizable and gender-swappable at pretty much any time in the game. Fenyx is an upbeat go-getter and somewhat of a fan of all of the various Greek gods and goddesses you encounter and end up helping. Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaistos (I'm using Canadian developer Ubisoft Montreal's spelling) and Athena are all cursed by the big baddie, Typhon, and it's your job to help them. The interesting part is that their curse has turned them into a form that represents their greatest weakness. For example, you meet Ares as a rooster who has no courage to do his god of war thing. Athena, the warrior goddess, has been turned into a child and so lost her agency to make her own decisions. Fenyx's deeds are all narrated by Prometheus, who is telling Zeus about the fallout of the big baddie, Typhon, escaping and causing all this havoc. The gods are all offspring of Zeus, and there are many hilarious moments in the story where Zeus confronts some of his more assholish deeds like when he turned into a bull to sleep with Europa, or different things he did while blackout drunk. The writers clearly had a lot of fun with this, but there is one really dark part of the story.
Hephaistos is the god of the forge, a blacksmith who was and is hopelessly in love with Aphrodite. He had Zeus force her to marry him and she clearly has no love for Heph and openly flirts with Ares. Well, when you meet Hephaistos, he's in the form of a robot without hands. His hands were taken away so that he couldn't smith, of course. But, he was turned into a robot because he would no longer suffer by dwelling on his terrible marriage and the isolation he faced after Zeus chucked him off of Mt. Olympos (Ubisoft spelling).
As Prometheus zings Zeus about his own deeds every once in a while, Zeus finally realizes that he's been a terrible father and takes a moment to feel bad about it. This is a decent emotional payoff if you've read much about this guy, or followed along with the PG version that Immortals tells you. And this personality in narration is the main distinguishing feature between this game and Breath of the Wild. BotW has Link and the world around him, and occasional music with some very spread out cutscenes as you encounter things in the world; it's very much an open book. I prefer Immortals with its narration, streamlined gameplay that's about collecting powerups and solving puzzles without managing inventory, durability, hunting/gathering/crafting and all that survival stuff. The map is also smaller. I did the platinum trophy in 50 hours, which is about 85% of the available content.
I really enjoyed this game and thought it was the right size. There are tons of cute and expressive animations when your character upgrades a skill or opens a treasure chest. One gripe is how sticky some surfaces are, so that if you're jumping around in combat in the overworld, you can end up sticking to a wall and trying to climb it. Also, early on you get the ability to throw objects. This doesn't work very well and isn't as snappy as it should be to use during combat. Lastly, the default controls are bad, but the game lets you remap everything. The problem there is that the game will warn you about overlapping button assignments and sometimes that's not even true. The music gets repetitive, and the game doesn't have the polish of a truly-PS5 build: loading times are barely faster than PS4, graphics are solid and the framerate is smooth, but not impressive considering what's been done with other PS5 titles. Overall, Immortals: Fenyx Rising reminds me of a Dreamworks movie. On its own, it's great and enjoyable, and funny. However, if you compare it to Pixar, you might start to notice some differences in quality.
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