‘Immortals of Aveum’ first look at Summer Game Fest
I played a demo of Immortals of Aveum at Summer Game Fest 2023, and it was gorgeous. Its cinematics were particularly impressive: The motion capture was smooth and the character models were finely detailed, with delicate eye markings and layers of gear. The clarity of the cutscenes made it easier to get lost in the dialogue and the ravaged fantasy world of Aveum, even in a short period of time. It’s heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on July 20th, and I'm looking forward to checking out the full game then. We'll be at Summer Game Fest all week, including the Xbox Showcase on June 11th and Ubisoft Forward on June 12th, so stay tuned for more first looks and impressions from the show.
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Video Transcript
- "Immortals of Aveum" is the debut game from Ascendant Studios, which is a new indie studio founded by Bret Robbins. He's a AAA veteran known for being the creative director of "Dead Space" and also some "Call of Duties" right after that. "Immortals" is being published by EA. And Bret describes the studio as a AAA indie.
So this is a game with a pretty large budget, it looks like, and a pretty large team behind it. There are about 100 people working at Ascendant Studios. And with the publishing power of EA, this game looks AAA, even though it is from an indie studio.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
It's built on Unreal Engine 5. So the graphics are pretty stellar. There's also some pretty big acting talent behind this game with actors from like "Firefly" and "Never Have I Ever."
So the cool thing about "Immortals of Aveum" is it's a first-person magic shooter. It doesn't rely on traditional guns in any way. Instead, there are streams of magic, bright colored streams-- blue, green, and red-- that the protagonist uses to defeat hordes of enemies in this epic, high fantasy environment. There are dragons in this game.
So there's a lot of political intrigue, a little Game of Thrones-esque, and then a huge story built around magic and a crumbling kingdom that you're trying to save. The magic is what really intrigued me about "Immortals of Aveum." And so I got a little bit of hands on time with the game.
And I had one stream of magic, a blue stream. And I went through a few different levels. I solved some puzzles to open some doors. And I encountered a few hordes of enemies. These were small hordes, maybe up to eight enemies at a time.
And I was able to use different abilities. One would grapple an enemy toward me. And then I was able to basically shoot a bunch of the other enemies with my other hand. And these were all blue magic abilities. I know later in the game, you're going to combine blue, red, and green. And you can get combos for using different kinds of magic. There are skill trees with like 80 nodes. But I didn't get to actually touch any of that.
So we'll have to see when the game comes out on July 20 how that all plays together. Spell casting, using your magic in this game is a really, like, rapid fire, frenzy feel. I played with an Xbox controller on a PC built of the game. And it was a little too fluid for me. I got to be honest. I need a little more time to get used to the speed of this game.
The environment was a little limiting in ways that you might not expect from a modern game, where it felt like there were walls that I should be able to climb or double jump over. And I wasn't able to actually grasp onto a ledge, get myself up and over. And that was by design because there were actually puzzles for me to open up specific doors by using different gems and hitting different spells.
I'm really excited to try out all the different types of magic in "Immortals of Aveum" and play the full game through with a little bit more time because my time with the demo felt a little one note. I know that Ascendant Studios is a AAA indie studio. But I definitely felt the indie side in this game. Even though my time with the demo wasn't seamless, I remain excited for "Immortals of Aveum."
It's really cool to see a new indie studio step up and build something really ambitious. And then they have the support of EA. And I think they can make this happen. I also think it's really cool that "Immortals of Aveum" is a single-player, narrative-driven experience in an industry that's really obsessed with multiplayer online games as a service. Add in the fact that it's a first-person shooter without any guns, and I'm sold.
We captured a lot of gameplay footage of my demo today. So we're going to let that roll. We'll be at Summer Game Fest all week. So stay tuned to engadget.com. And subscribe to the YouTube channel for all the latest news.
- Their next wave is moving in. And we've got positions that need bodies. The Rasharnians capture this leyline, we can all lie back down permanently. You're with Parker, right? I need him to line up his strikers along the eastern wall. There's a red division on its way.
- Yes, sir.
- Round two.
- Rasharnians haven't had enough yet?
- We haven't given them enough yet. That still work?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- It went down that whole.
