IMMORTALS FENYX RISING
An open world inviting discovery, not traversal filler
Prefer the likes of Rayman’s colourful worlds to the more realistic open expanses of The Division, Ghost Recon, Far Cry, and Assassin’s Creed? Then Immortals Fenyx Rising might be the game where Ubisoft hooks you with its sandbox gameplay. While at a glance this may seem to be very much styled after the likes of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, in many ways it’s a breath of fresh air for Ubisoft open worlds (though it’s a breath of the wild in others).
The Golden Isle where your (fully customisable) hero Fenyx is shipwrecked is littered with things to stumble across and discover, ensuring venturing out always feels rewarding. It’s also scattered with optional boss monsters (we fell a nasty, large cyclops in our hands-on), hidden ambrosia to collect, and a multitude of head-scratching puzzles hiding upgrade coins and blessings. Sometimes these are marked on the map as special challenges, but sometimes you simply stumble upon them.
FLEECING THE GOLDEN
The entire Golden Isle is open to explore when you set out on your quest to save the Greek pantheon from Typhon, who has corrupted the land. Each section of the island is themed around a different God, such as the more mechanical Hephaistos’ Forge.
“THE GOLDEN ISLE IS LITTERED WITH THINGS TO STUMBLE ACROSS.”
“MANY OF THE PUZZLES REQUIRE YOU TO THINK ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT AROUND YOU.”
This is the area we get to spend two hours exploring in our hands-on.
Our main task is to relight the forge, which means throwing coal into furnaces, either igniting the lumps beforehand or using our bow to set them alight after the fact, while dealing with nearby enemies. Like in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, you can guide arrows in a sort of first-person view, but here they’re used for more than headshots. One challenge we stumble across involves guiding an arrow through a sequence of hoops before lighting a brazier in a statue – throwing us right back to Spyro’s raceway levels.
We are actually quite impressed with the variety of puzzles. You can’t just run from point to point looting treasure and taking out enemies to mark the area off on your map. Many require you to think about the environment around you, as most puzzles make use of all of their surroundings. To solve star chart puzzles you need to locate nearby orbs, which are usually hidden within their own mini-puzzles, then place them to match a constellation on a grid (carrying things like orbs and blocks is pretty breezy as Fenyx has a magnetic lock ability that draws objects closer from quite some distance); fresco puzzles require you to find out how to unlock tiles and then slide them into place to create an image; music puzzles have you tracking down sections of a melody before recreating them on a larger instrument; and traversal challenges task you with navigating the world speedily, putting your horse riding, gliding, and cliffclambering skills to the test.
And that’s before you get to the Vaults. These hidden challenges throw you into the underworld to undertake a bespoke trial that could be anything from combat to puzzles (one even involves a makeshift pinball table), which themselves have hidden treasure to uncover away from their main paths. They’re bitesize, but can be tricky.
To cut a long story short, Immortals Fenyx Rising has puzzles in spades, and exploring the environment is genuinely gratifying. This gorgeous, painterly cartoonaesthetic world hides many secrets.
GODLY BLESSINGS
But there is combat too, and lots of it. We only get to play around with a fixed build of skills, but it’s from mid- to late-game so we have plenty to use. Similar to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, light attacks are on u and heavy attacks on i (a sword and axe respectively), and you can hold o to spend stamina on godly attacks, like a comically massive hammer, a launched batch of spears, or an extraquick, high-impact dash attack. It’s fast-paced, and you can use the long-range grab in combat to grapple far-off enemies – it’s particularly useful for flying opponents. Winged harpies aren’t the only creatures to contend with, as we also battle cerberuses (cerberi?), gorgons, and cyclops, though with smart use of god skills most fall to our might quite easily.
The whole thing has a warm, tongue-in-cheek vibe which we love, especially with the narration by the banterous Zeus and Prometheus (our demoexclusive narration poked fun at the name change and the previously-leaked footage). So: neat puzzles, a rewarding open world, pacey combat, and a funny atmosphere that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Ubisoft is onto a winner here.