Review TheKentuckian 2/5 · Jun 8, 2026
Mortally Wounded
Immortals of Aveum was one of the free monthly PS Plus games I while back and I was looking for something to play, so I decided I'd knock it off my backlog.
The one thing I knew aobut Immortals going into it was that it was sort of wizard Call of Duty, both in gameplay and story. I would say …
Immortals of Aveum was one of the free monthly PS Plus games I while back and I was looking for something to play, so I decided I'd knock it off my backlog.
The one thing I knew aobut Immortals going into it was that it was sort of wizard Call of Duty, both in gameplay and story. I would say that while a CoD influence is there, I would say the gameplay also takes cues from movement shooters like Doom 2016. You have three 'sigils', these are the wizard equivalents of guns in this world. Your blue sigil works like a rifle, your red sigil serves as the shotgun, and the green sigil is your machine gun. You also have some support items that help you move around the battlefield or put status effects on enemies.
After the first couple fights, the game makes it clear this isn't a 'hide behind cover taking potshots' game, you have to be on the move or enemies will overwhelm you. The problem with Immortals is they rarely strike that balance of fun and challenge that Doom does with combat. This game is filthy with bullet sponge, or I guess magic missile sponge, enemies that aren't fun to fight, they're just a healing crystal check. And the hitboxes on some of their attacks seems overly generous, like I would dodge out of the way of a sword strike just to still get hit with it. I also had several instances where I would dodge back from an enemy only for the game to rubber band them and have their feet slide across the ground just so they can hit me, which annoys me beyond measure. It doesn't help that most of the spongy enemies can take half your health in one hit. I can admit some of it being skill issue, but it also feels like you never really get to a point, even at the end of the game, where you are on par with the tougher enemies. You are a glass peashooter. Your weapons have unlimited ammo, but it felt like I was playing Doom Eternal where I was spending 60% of a fight just reloading. That is the trade off this game asks you to make, you can either have a weapon that does massive damage, but only holds 1-3 shots, or one that does average damage, but holds 5-7 shots. Then of course, the game trains you on how to use your support items to help in combat only then to have the miniboss and boss enemies just be immune to their effects.
There were several times where I had to step away from the game because the zerg rush of spongy enemies it wanted me to deal with was just pissing me off. Especially because the game does have a sort of matching game strategy to it. There's three colors of magic and miniboss enemies often use one of those colors. So if they have a blue shield, you have to use your blue weapon to make any dent on them. It's fine and is easy to read in a hectic firefight, but I kinda wish they did more of a Pokemon thing, like red magic is good against green magic enemies. I trudged through a lot of this game's bullshit because, well mostly the sunken cost fallacy, but by the time the game introduced the blue magic mini boss I knew I was close to the end & just couldn't be bothered to deal with anymore bullet sponge fights and just watched a YouTube video to see how the story ends.
Video games do have the advantage of if the gameplay is bad, the story might still save it, and vice versa. So, the story of Immortals of Aveum. We are placed in a new, original fantasy setting which does mean there's got to be a lot of heavy lifting in setting up this world and it's quirks. Unfortunately, the exposition feels like baby's first fantasy story. It does that think where it just dumps all these names on you and wants you to assume they are important. It's not out of the realm of possibility to hear a conversation in Immortals like “The Stoduls of Harkemier have invaded the free city of Plantha using the power of the N'Tholak wielded by their ruler, Yager Wall”. High fantasy has never been my favorite genre, but I did enjoy the Witcher & Elder Scrolls. I think fantasy works best in open world games. There you can explore the world and get drip fed all the different quirks of their world through side quests, but when you have a linear FPS like Immortals you don't have that leisure, so you get these expedition dumps of nonsense words. It feels like the characters are making up the story as they go, because after each mission you get a cutscene where someone goes, “Ah, that's bad, but we could reach out to the Voluns who guard the Retifier. It could help us end this war.” The world of Aveum itself goes for more of that sci-fi-ish fantasy vibe like something from Dragon Age. There's flying ships and mechanical Gundam, and crystals galore. I find that fantasy games that take inspiration from a historical source, whether the Medieval Poland or the Renaissance Venice, are the ones where I can get invested in the world vs the generic fantasy worlds. The one thing that makes Aveum different from other worlds is that magic is the norm, not the exception. Skyrim, Witcher, and Baldur's Gate all have magic and wizards, but they are a part of the world and usually don't outnumber your non-magic people. In Aveum, everyone is a wizard, or at least can cast basic spells.
Being listless is something both the world and story of Immortals suffers from. You play as Jack, who starts out as just a street rat living in the rough part of town making ends meet as a pickpocket with his friend Luna. You two end up caught up in a fight when the evil empire attacks. Luna falls to her death and Jack learns he's a wizard. The commander of the Immortals, the shock troops who fight with the Light Army against the evil army, takes Jack in and trains him as a soldier. Your commander, Kirkan, is presented as a tough, but fair leader, but don't worry her character devolves into Commander Dumbass by the end of the game. Five years later, Jack is a soldier in the Light Army fighting in the Everwar, subtle name, and gets promoted to Immortal. Here we meet the other two Immortals, Zendara who is an Amazonian built like a brick shithouse, and Devin who is a pampered noble. There's a few other Immortals, but they play no real part in the story, just hang out around base. You are all tasked with stopping Sandrak, the leader of the evil empire. He's trying to absorb all the magic in the world to stop the Everwar. We meet Sandrak and the game tries to paint him as sort of a villain who has a point, a hero of his own story, but every time he's on screen he's just a cackling evil villain. With our backs against the wall, Kirkan sends Jack to find the former leader of the Immortals, Thaddeus.
On the search for him, we meet Kenzie, a rabble rousing wizard who has sworn off getting involved in the Everwar as she hates both sides. Here is where we hear Devin talk about how the authoritarianism of the Light kingdom is better than the failed democracy of Kenzie's people. It's where I thought the game was going to start the cliché where Jack learns maybe the good guys aren't so good and he would join a plucky band of rebels to fight the power. That thought was compounded when we met Rook, the leader of a Quinarri like people who live underground because humans hunt them because they eat magic. He's a gruff, angry dude voiced by Clancy Brown. Then finally we meet Thaddeus, who is a retired Old West gunslinger basically. Again, this is where I think the game world would benefit from taking real world inspiration for it's setting. He's probably my favorite character, but he seems out of place among queens, nobles, and other fantasy trappings. If he wasn't the only 'cowboy' in the game, it wouldn't seem as odd, but he is. There's also something on the Everwar, it's being fought to decide who gets to control the resource that is magic and as the war continues, the magic is causing a growing pit to swallow the world. It could easily have been made to make this story a magical version of the War on Terror, switching out the oil for magic. That could've been the real world inspiration for Aveum. What if these magic soldiers acted like American GIs in Iraq, humor and all. It'd give Immortals a unique identity.
After finding Thaddeus, we are attacked by Sandrak and his 2nd in command. She's a masked wizard, so I immediately knew that's going to be our friend Luna whose not really dead. It is, because this game's writing is hacky. Her and Jack have an argument where she is convinced Sandrak can save the world through his conquest, so, we have friends to enemies. Jack also have visions of the god who gave magic to the world that he can't interpret. Kirkan sends Jack to find a forge that will let him destroy the magic stone Sandrak uses to absorb magic. Here, Jack decides to instead use the forge to make a mark that lets him control the stone instead of destroy it. This is one of the big problems with the writing. Characters don't feel consistent, instead their goals line up with whatever the plot demands. Jack has been shown to be someone who wants to end the war and holds onto his roots as a kid from the streets among these haughty mages. He's never seemed interested in massing power, so why he doesn't chose to get the mark to destroy the stone vs control it seems inconsistent with the character we've been shown.
The other problem for Immortals story is it doesn't have time to breath, everything is happening at a breakneck pace. There's one mission where Kirkan leaves to meet the king and Jack is placed under Zendara's command, and they don't get along. I thought okay, here's where our conflict will be for a while, but by the next mission Kirkan is back and that's it, nothing is said about her visit to the king or anything. Then later Jack gets kicked out of the Immortals because he betrays them, but that lasts a whole mission then they are happy Jack is back to help them fight. The speed at which the story progresses makes it feel like nothing really matters, the game is just going through the motion.
So, since he disobeyed orders, Jack gets kicked out & Sandrak wins the war. Sandrak destroys our home base and we learn that Kirkan tried to stop Sandrak's evil empire by pulling a Krogan Genophage, but instead of no one being born, she made it so no magic users were born in Sandrak's empire. So, we see that she isn't as good as we originally believed. We wake up a month later to find we're back in the slums we grew up in and Luna has decided to become our ally again. She helps us escape the city and join with the resistance fighters. Here's where we get that rebel fight, but it's not against the Light kingdom, because they were conquered by Sandrak. Zendara, Rook, & Thaddeus task Jack with saving Kirkan from Sandrak and closing the hole that's devouring the world. Surprisingly Kenzie doesn't show up here as one of the rebels. We learn that Kirkan isn't a prisoner but has instead started working with Sandrak, again Commander Dumbass, her one character trait is just making the worst decisions. I think they were trying to write her as a general who is playing 4D chess, shifting her alliances when a better solution presents itself regardless of its costs, but she just comes off as a contrarian who is purposefully picking the worst options.
The story ends with us stopping Sandrak from killing god and Jack sacrifices himself to close the pit and save the world. Kirkan goes into hiding to be the villain for a sequel that's never happening, and Zendara becomes the new commander of the Immortals. And we learn that Jack was brought back to life as a favor from the god he helped save.
Another thing that makes the story rough is the humor. It's very much what people would call Whedon humor or Marvel humor, where every character is the comic relief character. If this game was released 10 years ago, this probably would've been lauded as peak comedy, but that style of humor is definitely in it's sunset era. If only Jack was the wisecracker, this still could've worked, maybe. As it is, anytime there's a chance to make a joke, regardless of the scene or mood, a character will make the joke. And humor is subjective, but I don't recall really laughing at any of these jokes. It's the most basic “Uh, well that just happened” style of comedy.
All in all, the longer I played, the less I liked Immortals of Aveum. It's gameplay is a slog of fighting unfun enemies and the story is nonsensical, but not even in a so bad it's good way. The basic idea is interesting, a wizard FPS, but there are indie games that do that much better. This feels like a launch title game, where it's more about spectacle than actually being good. I honestly don't even know if I'd recommend this game for free. Maybe play the first hour or so, it's when the combat is still enjoyable, but then pull chute.
