I liked the name Gods and Monsters. It was a bit plain, perhaps, but pulpy and straightforward. You knew what you were getting. It suggested some big godly powers and even bigger mythical beasts to whack them with, all set in a fantasy Ancient Greece. This would have been fine, I suppose. But it’s clear from a few hours’ play that Ubisoft has grander ideas, and that after a lengthy delay, some re-working and a new 3rd December release date, the game now known as Immortals Fenyx Rising wants to be something quite a bit bigger.
Despite its MOBA-ish moniker, Immortals is an action RPG from the talented Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Odyssey team at Ubisoft Quebec. The narrative is told in a very different way, but there is a similarity to the feel of its light-hearted storytelling, while its combat and gear systems are even more familiar still. It’s immediately apparent the other big influence is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of Wild, which is riffed on to a surprising degree.
Plenty of games now use Zelda’s stamina meter, or employ a similar glider. But Immortals’ landscape is essentially defined by Nintendo’s Switch opus, with a mix of Odyssey’s more fantastical realms thrown in for good measure. Spread across its world are combat and puzzle shrines – sorry, “Vaults” – and tricky little puzzle areas on the open map that require the use of the game’s physics engine to solve. There’s a limited version of cooking. There’s a power to pick up items with magnets. You can head straight to the world’s toughest areas from the very beginning. I could go on. If Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was Ubisoft’s take on The Witcher, this is its version of Zelda, in a year where the closest Nintendo fans will get is a spin-off hack-and-slash.
Instead of Hyrule, Immortals is spread across a set of seven embattled lands home to various Greek gods. The lush green area seen when the game was first unveiled is home to Aphrodite, for example, while the section in this new demo was a rusty, dusty outback home to Hephaestus and his mighty forge. The enemies here, along with cyclopes and minotaurs, include hulking robots that reminded me of Skyward Sword’s ancient desert mechanicals. Here, as with other areas, main character Fenyx was battling to save the land from the beast-like Ganon, sorry, , a demonic Greek god once imprisoned by Zeus for being a troublemaker.
Gods and Monsters: Origins
“My first memory of what became Immortals was about halfway through Odyssey we had a bug where instead of having humans on your crew you had a bunch of giant Cyclopses,” game director Scott Phillips recalled.
“It got a bunch of us thinking – we could do a bit with a game focused solely on the mythology. With Odyssey you need to be historically authentic. When it came to this, the first thing on our mind was how to bring Ancient Greece mythology to the 21st Century.”
Throughout this demo there wasn’t much of a chance to get to know Fenyx, which left me with the feeling Ubisoft was playing around with a largely silent protagonist. Instead, the game’s story is told via voiceover – a surprise, and one of Immortals’ standout original ideas – given via the chatty Zeus and Prometheus. While the dialogue here was recorded specifically for this demo, the pair will provide a somewhat unreliable narration throughout the full game, as they peer down at Fenyx’s efforts. Prometheus is the straight man, while Zeus (played by Odyssey’s Barnabas voice actor Andreas Apergis) is the rock star god who missed half the set crushing cans backstage. The pair squabble and bicker, occasionally breaking the fourth wall when the exposition gets too long-winded or to crack a joke. In a way, it makes the rest of the game’s straight-faced take on Zelda a little less bare-faced, with a nudge and a wink to acknowledge you may have seen this kind of puzzle before.
“We felt this was a different way to tell the story,” game director Scott Phillips told me via a call later on. “We still wanted a strong main character but felt these narrators let us be a little more verbose with the history without it feeling like the player character is a historian taking you on a tour. Zeus and Prometheus go on this learning journey about Zeus, king of the gods. You as Fenyx go on a journey meeting all these gods and gaining their help to defeat Typhon. Those two stories weave back and forth together and conclude together. Overall it’s a bit Ancient Greek Guardians of the Galaxy – its interactions are lighthearted but the stakes are epic – and world-ending if you don’t succeed in your task.” In the full game, Fenyx will definitely speak, Phillips continued – and be quite chatty in their interactions with the gods throughout the story. Early on in the game you get to create your own version of the character, with a choice of body types, voice types, skin colour, hair and eye colour, beards, facial scars and more. This can then be changed again later in the game’s Hall of the Gods hub.
Immortals Fenyx Rising: World Premiere Trailer Watch on YouTube
If you’ve played Assassin’s Creed Odyssey you’ll immediately be familiar with how Fenyx will grow in strength throughout the game, via the addition of powers you can learn and equip from a skill tree. Some are nearly identical, such as the ability to control arrows in-flight, or to charge into a group of enemies to send them scattering. Melee combat is familiar too, with sword and axe gear slots replacing Odyssey’s light and heavy attacks. Other slots are taken up by your armour set, helmet, phoenix and mount, all of which come imbued with perks. There are no numbers visible, but items can be upgraded in power. And, again like Odyssey, there’s a well-timed dodge mechanic to avoid damage rather than physical shields.