Immortals: Fenyx Rising - final analysis

So after 40 hours of gameplay or so I have FINALLY finished this game by Ubisoft Quebec. I have mixed feeling about it overall and mostly I am just happy that it is over. I enjoyed most of it but there are some quite seriously downsides about the game that had I not already been nearly finished with the game, I probably would have just deleted it and never returned.

Mostly, I think the game is still worth playing but it isn't the epic adventure that I was hoping it would be when I first jumped in. I think that this opinion is pretty widespread and this is the reason why it is that a lot of us have never heard of this game despite the fact that it is quite old and made by a major studio.

There will be spoilers ahead

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First of the story: The story is actually pretty good as it is an unusual and somewhat comedic take on Greek mythology. The commentary is dominated by Prometheus and Zeus as our actions are meant to be something that is foretold by Prometheus speaking to Zeus about events that already occurred.

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I think they probably went for a humorous angle because otherwise there would be comparisons to God of War and I can see how someone would end up with that opinion because the music, the side characters, and even some of the puzzles are similar to that game. I'm not saying they were lazy because they definitely got their own thing going on here, but there are some parallels between the two games and I would imagine this is unavoidable whenever dealing with Greek mythology. Who did it best? Well, God of War obviously, but the two games aren't really at all the same as far as overall ambiance is concerned.

The cool thing about the story is that by the time you get to the end of it you couldn't really see that coming. The twist at the end that has you fighting Typhon again, this time without your trusty Phoenix as a sidekick, was a special fight that I didn't expect.

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I think if I was going to have any major complaint about this game it would be the combat. I may have missed one in my count but there are only like 10 enemy characters in the entire game. Some of the bosses are just different color versions of the same enemies with a larger HP pool. So you learn very early on how to deal with every enemy type that exists in the entire game and unfortunately these tactics never deviate. Other than when you have to fight these same enemies on some sort of platform that has spikes coming out of it on a timer, the process is always going to be the same.

For me, this consisted of getting a few arrow shots in early to deal with annoying ranged enemies, and then just spamming freeze and sword strike on the larger ones. There are other elements of combat that you can use such as counter-attacks after a block, but there really is no NEED to ever do this since the combat isn't complex enough for its use to be warranted. You can do it if you want, but it offers no advantage other than a little bit of satisfaction for having that sort of reaction time. These counter-attacks actually take LONGER and do LESS DAMAGE than if you just spammed sword attack, so to me, there was no reason to ever use them.

The puzzles that exist in the game was something that I originally praised because I felt as though it mixed things up in the game a bit.

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However, after doing these 40 or so times in a row and having them be only SLIGHTLY different than the 39 I did before, they got boring as well. Some of the puzzles are interesting and others are just intentionally tedious. Also, the rewards that you get at the end of them are not big enough to justify the sometimes 40 minutes or so that a difficult vault is going to take to complete.

By the time I got around 50-60% of the way through the game, I was skipping all of these except for the mandatory ones.

I love the use of colors and the world is really beautiful. Even on the 10 year old console the system didn't have any trouble keeping the framerate high and there were almost no instances of choppy graphics despite being able to see far into the distance. Kudos to Ubisoft for pulling this off.

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Exploring is fun for the most part, but after while I found myself tiring of the optional side quests to various chests that were hidden from view sometimes in an annoying fashion, and I don't think I did any vaults after about 50% of the way through the game because they are optional, and I didn't need to power up any more than I already was.

One thing that was super annoying and thank goodness it happened only once comes at the very end of the game

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That tower behind me that leads to the final boss fight opens up after you open the 4 (it's almost always 4) gates that make it rise further up. At the last platform there is a jump that must be executed absolutely perfectly or you are going to fall to your doom. This results in you getting sent back to a save point that requires you to do the entire tower over again to the tune of around 8 minutes per go just to have a chance at that near impossible jump at the end.

I was convinced that I must have missed a switch somewhere but before wandering around this huge map I decided to look it up on Reddit and found out that basically everyone was having the same problem. Many people stopped playing the game because of it. Someone had discovered a workaround where you use one of your god powers to summon a statue (normally used for weighing down plates in puzzles) and standing on top of it before executing your jump. Once I did this I still barely made it to the other side.

Things like this getting put into games are lame. It makes you think that you are doing something wrong when in reality it was an intentional addition into the game. Why? We already unlocked all the platforms so why on earth would they have a damn-near-impossible fall-to-your-death ledge at the very last portion of the game? It's just frustrating and based on the community response, they should have patched that out a year ago.

By the time the end fight is over and the game was done it gave me the opportunity to go back into the open world to complete other optional things that I hadn't yet done. I opted not to do these things and instead deleted the game from my hard drive.

Overall, I had a good time playing this game but IMO, it is too long considering the extremely repetitive combat scenarios as well as the fact that the map is unnecessarily huge in order to accommodate optional objectives that most people are not going to bother with because they are not at all necessary to complete the game. I would still recommend that people give this game a look especially if they get it for free and you do if you have PS-Plus extra. Unfortunately, it didn't end up being the epic game that I had hoped it would be. If I had to give this a score out of 10 it would be 7/10 or maybe even 6/10.