Immortals of Aveum preview: more than just Call of Duty with magic

There’s a lot of lore coming with Aveum Immortals; you’d expect that when the game and the story blend science fiction technology and powerful magic, and the characters are dressed in a slightly high-fantasy manner. It’s also an old-school, single-player narrative, so heck yeah, there’s going to be a big story behind it.

We will continue to discuss this topic later. This is what the ball players need to keep an eye on: Aveum Immortals The magic-powered first-person shooter is available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

The taste was delicious! Aveum Immortals’s spell-powered shooting during a reveal trailer at The Game Awards 2022 in December. The gameplay trailer is out on Thursday. We also saw the closed-door developer presentation last week to get a much deeper understanding.

“It’s a type of game we haven’t seen for many, many years,” Bret Robbins, chief executive of Ascendant Studios, said during the presentation. Probably the closest comparison most FPS fans will make is to Raven Software’s Quake engine The Heretic The original and two sequels to it, which were both published 25 years apart.

Robbins started Ascendant back in 2018. They wanted a story with depth and a world that was engaging. And of course, single-player, crisp shooter gameplay. There is a lot to see and a lot to pay off for the player. But foremost, Ascendant’s creators wanted to create a powerful battle mage that everyone would want to become.

“Everything about the game had to be the fantasy of being this powerful, awesome, gunslinger of a wizard,” Robbins said.

Grid View

From what’s been shown, Ascendant seems to have pulled at least that off. We saw an example of an early mission, which looked to be an attack on an alien invasion. It was carried in futuristic airships. Glyphs and wards popped up around the player’s hands, somewhat Doctor Strange-style, as the main character (named Jak) raised a shield or fired off a rapid-fire burst of “green magic.”

Jak’s story is somewhat the standard up-from-nothing tale, using a rare means of harnessing all three of Aveum’s “lines” of magic to become a military savior. Aveum has seen its factions fighting it out over more than 1000 years, in what is called the Everwar. The Immortals are more or less the top military unit, “almost a team of superheroes,” according to Robbins. Jak is on the road to becoming one.

In combat, Jak’s standard ranged weapons (what would be guns in another FPS) are on his right hand. His left hand can be used for defense moves and powerful attacks known as Furies, which drain mana. He also uses an energy lash in order to draw enemies into the area for a close finish. (Yes, it did remind me a little of 2011’s Bulletstorm).

Naturally, Aveum Immortals will serve all of this with a library of spells, special abilities called talents, plus other gear customizations that both progress Jak and fit him to a player’s style. For example, that thing at the end of Jak’s right arm projecting magic is a Sigil. You can use other Sigils to be a generalist or a specialist of one form of magic. Robbins gave the example of a “Javelin” Sigil, which allows Jak to power up a huge shot.

“Because it’s magic, we can do quite a bit more than you could with standard modern guns,” Robbins said.

Image by Ascendant Studios/Electronic Arts

Aveum is dotted with three magic ribbons: Force (blue), Chaos (red), and Life (green). Basic weapon terminology describes Chaos as a shotgun. Blue is more precise and can be used for longer ranges, while green is similar to an SMG. The sound supporting all this is definitely more FPS than magical, with explosions, and the thudding report of your “guns” resembling energy weapons from sci-fi shooters.

“We made a lot of decisions around magic, and how we wanted it to feel different than traditional guns,” Robbins said. “For one thing, I didn’t want to make a traditional cover shooter; I didn’t think the fantasy that I was trying to create involved you hiding behind the bush and firing the wand over it.” Hence the shield, which can be fired through while raised; it just slows the player down some. The shield also has its own health, and it can be destroyed when exhausted.

Robbins added that the “Call of Duty but with magic” label, while a good shorthand or elevator pitch for its appeal, leaves out some other gameplay aspects that Ascendant wanted to implement in Aveum ImmortalsUnreal Engine 5 has developed the following:

“We have a lot of world exploration, a lot of puzzles and puzzle mechanics,” he said. “It’s a huge game. If you’re just trying to play it straight through, it’s well over 20, 25 hours. And if you want to really explore and do a lot, it gets quite a bit longer than that.”

Immortals of Aveum Ascendant has released the game, which is their first. Ascendant was founded in the Bay Area by former Telltale Games employees who have been involved with projects like BioShock and Borderlands. Robbins is also credited on Call of Duty titles, and was part of Visceral’s team that created the Call of Duty title. Dead SpaceThe story-rich action-adventure ‘The New Adventures of…, was released to console viewers in 2008.

Robbins often cited Robbins’ inspiration Aveum as coming from a stray thought he had when he was designing a Call of Duty level — basically, what if all of its elements were swapped for their fantasy counterparts. Ascendant Studios was established to make the game Robbins had been dreaming of.

Ascendant Studios has now more than 100 employees, while Electronic Arts under its EA Originals brand will publish Aveum Immortals For PS5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X starting July 20.