You’d be forgiven for not having heard about Immortals of Aveum, or at least letting it slip your memory. The game was revealed during a particularly stacked The Game Awards presentation last year, but it’s been fairly quiet since.
Now, thanks to a hands-off preview opportunity with the game’s “independent AAA” team at Ascendant Studios, we have a more clear idea of where this EA Originals-backed project is going and what to expect from a studio staffed by talent previously involved in the likes of Call of Duty, Dead Space, Bioshock, numerous Telltale games and… Gex?!
We were lucky enough to get an early first look at gameplay of Immortals of Aveum along with some guidance from the folks at Ascendant on what they’re trying to achieve with this ambitious debut title that’s been in development for five years. CEO of Ascendant Studios, Bret Robbins, has brought nearly three decades of experience that started with titles like Legacy of Kain and Gex and eventually led to a Creative Director credit on the original Dead Space and three major Call of Duty titles.
Robbins was in the middle of prototyping for what would become Immortals of Aveum when the big Telltale closure happened in 2018, and was quick to bring on some of that studio’s immense talent alongside developers from some big names like 2K, Sledgehammer, Hangar 13 and Cloud Chamber to grow a team of veterans that would eventually be 100+ strong and with a focus on creativity, passion – and importantly work/life balance. An early demo of the game wowed the folks at EA Originals, who quickly picked it up to get it over the line to release.
Of course with a fresh studio comes fresh ideas, and Immortals of Aveum immediately comes across as fresh despite it clearly drawing on the bombastic and cinematic nature of modern story-drive first person shooters. The key difference of course being that it trades out guns for magic. Robbins says he was inspired by his work on Call of Duty, and in particular its huge, cinematic set piece firefights, pondering what these scenes would look like with dragons, fantasy knights and spells in place of helicopters, soldiers and firearms.
Set in brand-new, original world, Immortals of Aveum puts players in the role of Jak, a battlemage (known in-world as a Magnus). Jak starts life as someone with no magical ability, but finds himself able to wield powerful and diverse magic following an undisclosed event. This sees him recruited into the Immortals, a special forces unit made up of the most powerful battlemages who have a key role in the ongoing war over Aveum’s natural magical resources.
One of the studio’s core goal pillars for Immortals of Aveum is to make players feel like a bad-ass “gunslinging” wizard, and while watching the player fire off spells with hand gestures in first person immediately drew some the fairly-recent Ghostwire: Tokyo, it really is a whole different beast. It’s fast, explosive and incredibly cinematic, tasking players to manage three distinct schools of magic with their own properties that compare favourably to familiar gun types – blue for accurate, long-range shots, red for close-quarters spread fire and green for rapid, loose shots.
Over the course of the game, players will be able to customise their playstyle and abilities tied into these strands of magic by upgrading and equipping Jak with new Sigils, as well as other magical equipment. Jak also has a castable shield for defense, a teleport and a magical lash to pull and throw enemies. Furies round out the skillset as powerful, mana-draining spells to give players a diverse toolset to wield effectively based on the enemies they’re fighting. A simple example that Robbins gives us is using blue magic specifically to chew through blue shields carried by foes.
Watching Jak square off against some tough and varied enemies, it really does ring of a mix of the more nuanced and inventive combat typical of fantasy action RPGs, and the spectacle and physicality of first-person blockbusters like Call of Duty or Halo. Definitely some Destiny vibes when it comes to the power fantasy and combat feel, but with an admirable attention to providing a deeply story-driven, vehemently single-player experience.
The team at Ascendant is promising a huge, 25-hour single-player campaign here that will take players deep into the original and magical world of Aveum complete with side quest, puzzles and spectacular boss fights, and I’m eager to see where it all heads. We got to see a range of disconnected segments of the game, including a later mission that’s featured in its public marketing and looks incredibly hectic with some intriguing and intimidating-looking enemies. Ten-foot, lanky metal dudes with powerful laser eyes? Jinkies.
Part of our look at the game also cutscene moments, which highlight the impressive production values within Immortals of Aveum. Powered by the Unreal Engine 5.1 with the full suite of features like Lumen and Nanite technology, it’s looking mighty fine. It’s hard to gauge from pre-cut and compressed video of course, but this is shaping up to be a hell of a visual showpiece between both its high-octane gameplay with massive, rich environments and shiny spell effects and its quieter moments with detailed and motion-captured characters.
It’s helped along by a fantastic-looking cast too, which includes the likes of Gina Torres, Lily Cowles, Darren Barnet, Steven Brand, Antonio Aakeel and Yvonne Senat Jones.
The team at Ascendant Studios is visibly amped and excited about the project, which has evidently been in stealth mode as far as public showings for some time but is now coming surprisingly close to release on July 20th. I’m curious as to how it’s all going to come together in a way that goes beyond the idea of “Call of Duty with guns” and makes it stand out both in its gameplay and its world, but for now I’m champing at the bit to see more.
Immortals of Aveum releases on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC on July 20th, 2023.
Take a look at the just-released gameplay reveal trailer below:
