![]() ![]() Carefully shoving and guiding physics-driven puzzle elements for minutes at a time, only to land in repeated failure states, isn't my idea of a good adventure-gaming time.īut if another third-person adventure from Ubisoft that lands somewhere between Assassin's Creed, Kid Icarus, and Breath of the Wild sounds like fun to you, take a look at the above gallery to get a sense of the game's open-world questing potential ahead of its December 2 launch on consoles, Stadia, and PC.Same principle, but swimming. Other puzzles in my two-hour session were impossible or difficult to complete, owing to the demo's prerelease status-but with only a few months ahead of Immortals' December launch, that's cold comfort. Immortals let me aim my arrows out of order without any sort of "you missed one of the gates" notices you might expect in a game's typical puzzle scenario. One of them asked me to guide an arrow through a series of gates, and each lit up when I successfully went through the gate, but I kept failing the puzzle. I liked the idea, but it was hard to appreciate when the game's puzzles were an absolute slog to complete. Instead, the only time-slowing option I found was a magical arrow that Fenyx can take control of and manually aim, which figured into a few of the puzzles I played. ![]() Also, in the demo level I played, Fenyx couldn't do BotW-styled things like slow down time, create a bomb, and then whack a time-frozen object to turn it into a zany ping-pong ball. Fenyx's weapons don't deteriorate, and she has access to a few supercharged attacks that she can juggle into attack combos, which let her immediately switch between a quick sword, a slower axe, and a ranged bow. Immortals isn't identical to Breath of the Wild, mind you. But I'm not sure Ubisoft has chosen the best time to use an accurate read of classical literature as an excuse for two larger-than-life men to mock a woman who does all the work. The only defense of this tone that I could offer at this point is that it sets up Zeus as a toxic, domineering father figure, which is in line with Greek mythology. Can we skip forward?" And when Prometheus describes a beautiful vista in the distance, Zeus seems to insinuate that this is somehow a flirt toward Fenyx: "Over it. After Fenyx completes one trial, Zeus says, "OK, I get the picture, she's our hero. Other commentary directly undercuts her actions. "Isn't that what the best poetry's about?" Prometheus replies. "A lot of poetry for something they're just going to stick in their mouth," Zeus quips about a description of an in-game food item. Advertisementīut by the end of the demo, these narrators' constant needling, meant to lighten the game's mood, instead sounded like the stuff of a low-brow locker room shouted over a leading woman's heroics. "It's called, where's my skip button?" Zeus retorts. ![]() "It's called dramatic effect," Prometheus explains. This starts out cute enough, with meta-jokes like Zeus asking Prometheus in the demo's opening to cut an elaborate story short. Instead, she mostly toils in silence, while Zeus and Prometheus serve as overbearing narrators, riffing like a Greek-god version of the Muppets' Statler and Waldorf. At first glance, you may look at the armor-clad hero and think Ubisoft has continued its streak of cool-and-powerful game heroines, following Assassin's Creed Odyssey's Kassandra.īut my two hours with the game included very little dialogue from this heroine. The game stars Fenyx, a mortal Greek woman with supernatural powers like flight and telekinesis, on a mission to restore order to Mount Olympus. (It's been around for long enough, having originally been revealed as a game called Gods & Monsters, but now has a new title and a December 2 release date.) Before I get into the game's mechanics-which rip off BotW so shamelessly that I wonder whether Nintendo may press charges-I want to talk about its tone. The two-hour demo I played of Immortals: Fenyx Rising, a third-person adventure in the vein of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, feels like a game from a problematic Ubisoft era. As part of today's "Ubisoft Forward" event-which began with a statement from CEO Yves Guillemot apologizing for years of abusive behavior and a recent PR faux pas-the game studio revealed a game that, in light of the company's issues, seems like a weird flex. ![]()
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