#IMMORTALS FENYX RISING SWITCH REVIEW UPGRADE#
#IMMORTALS FENYX RISING SWITCH REVIEW FULL#

Occasionally you’ll drop into one of the game’s vaults and solve some fairly elaborate block-moving and jumping puzzles. In contrast, the small upgrades to your stamina meter and potion effects keep your power balanced with what the game can throw at you.įor most of the main story quests, the game frames your tasks in the open world, with all its dynamic events, including temporary minibosses that chase you randomly throughout your journey, ready to interrupt what might otherwise be a simple task.

#IMMORTALS FENYX RISING SWITCH REVIEW UPGRADE#

One particular upgrade gives your bird companion the ability to freeze foes in place on a short cooldown, effectively breaking some encounters. This is largely because of the game’s Godly Powers, which don’t necessarily trivialize the game by pure damage numbers - although some probably could - but instead nullify the need for clever tactics. Instead, you eventually reach a point where few enemies bite back and fewer stretches of land are uncrossable. It’s a critical mistake that denies the thrill of success in an ecosystem that never stops being oppressive. Unfortunately, unlike Nintendo’s 2017 game and even this year’s Genshin Impact, the challenges of Immortals’ world don’t grow with you after many hours of progress. For a large chunk of the game, Immortals doesn’t hand its world over to you it asks that you fight for it. Though you can eke out victories with perfectly timed dodges and parries, the general sense of unease enlivens each battle. Every encounter takes planning, effort, and resources. And the cyclops with a health bar several times larger than yours has to be avoided, not annihilated. The puzzles strewn throughout the environment just won’t make sense until you’ve gotten a handle on your own abilities.

#IMMORTALS FENYX RISING SWITCH REVIEW FULL#

That mountain over there can’t be climbed until you’ve prepared for it with pockets full of stamina potions. When was the last time an open-world game told you no? Immortals pushes back against the trend of conquest simulators. It offers friction where so many games don’t. And in the swaying grass and dozing animals below, you see the ways this world might both welcome you and threaten you - at least without the right equipment and upgrades.įor the first dozen hours before you wade deeper into the linear story, Immortals is courageous for a Ubisoft game, and for an open-world game. In the towering statues of the Greek gods Aphrodite, Athena, Ares, and Hephaistos, you see landmarks to guide your path without the need for a map (although there’s one in your menu). In the mountains that puncture the bright sky, you see opportunities to climb and glide - restrained by a stamina bar, of course. When you step out onto the sun-bleached ledge of the Hall of the Gods - the game’s central hub - all of Immortals’ goals appear in front of you.

But Immortals shows progress for a genre notorious for bloat, scope creep, and tedium its tight construction highlights the parts that make the best open-world games tick. Like a lot of games made by hundreds of people, the resulting iteration in Immortals feels safe. Kassandra and the many systems of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey are here, too, in the wry hero Fenyx and in the many icons on the map. Although Link, Zelda, and the rest of Hyrule aren’t here, the bright, grassy fields and physics-based puzzles are abundant in Ubisoft’s mythical, action-adventure game. If Breath of the Wild and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey exist on a spectrum, Immortals Fenyx Rising is somewhere in between.

Immortals fenyx rising switch review