It’s a very rare occurrence for me to get really hyped about a new video game. It’s rare for me to be like “I have to get this game” and then keep up that momentum until I actually get the game. Usually when it comes to big games I either join in on the hype too late after the game’s already been out for a long time, or I was involved with the game in some way before it’s release.

Games like Red Dead Redemption II and Animal Crossing: New Horizons fall into that former category. With both games, I had very little intention in actually getting the game and release day would come and I still haven’t gotten it. But then after it’s already been out I would see people playing it and talking about the games and then I would get interested in playing them. That’s the complete opposite of hype.

The other category is for games that I like but only because I get involved, which falls into 3 categories. The first one is where I get review copies of an upcoming game or I work with a developer or publisher. The second is where I am invited to play the beta of a game and end up putting like 10 to 15 hours in before a game even comes out. The third category is for games that I personally invested in, either through Kickstarter or other means.

Take Genshin Impact for example. The first time I ever heard of it was maybe months after everyone else was already hyped about it, and I didn’t even care too much for it until I was invited to play the beta. I put in like 20 hours and loved it. The same thing went down with a bunch of other Kickstarter or review games like Bug Fables, Battle Worlds: Kronos, Jurassic World Evolution, and others.

Sure in these cases, I was hyped for the game weeks before release, but I was already playing the game. It’s actually very rare for me to want to play a new game badly and be really hyped. In fact, before this there were only two games in all of 2020 that I was really really hyped for and I still haven’t played either of them. The first was Digimon Survive which for some reason still isn’t even out yet. The other is the Fairy Tail game, which the hype died down after release for me because I heard about bugs and wanted to wait for a patch.

But it was very different with Immortals Fenyx Rising, which is probably the most excited that I’ve ever been for an upcoming game. I first heard of the game earlier in 2020 back when it was still Gods and Monsters. I remember every time I would look at the upcoming games page on Gamestop’s website, this would show up, so I probably saw the title dozens of times before I even heard of the game officially.

That happened in a video of the best upcoming games. I remember seeing someone say that the game was going to be pretty cool and I think it was the same video where I first found out about Genshin Impact. I remember being excited and seeing other people online who were also excited but there was no info, there wasn’t even a trailer or anything and then everything went quiet.

Then in early September, Wood Hawler posted a video of him playing the game on his YouTube channel. His video was basically a world premiere where the game was finally showcased for the first time and I remember watching the video 2 or 3 times because the game looked so good. This was also only 10 weeks before the release of the game, but the floodgates opened and there was a bunch of trailers, additional gameplay videos, and even animations and other videos about the game.

It looked like a cross between Breath of the Wild and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey which was fitting because it was developed by the Assassin’s Creed team. I knew I had to get the game, it looked just as good as games like Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact. Then on December 3rd, the game came out, I bought it and found out that the game was actually so much better that I was even expecting. So in the end, I ended up playing the game for a couple hours a day every day for like 2 to 3 weeks.

I was so into the game that I knew I had to do a special review for it just an hour or two after starting. My first big review was for Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization and I didn’t even confirm that I wanted to review it until like 5 days and 20-30 hours of gameplay later. My next big review was for Pokemon Sword and I didn’t even start that until 11 months after getting the game. But with Immortals, just an hour after starting the game, I realized that there was already so much stuff to talk about.

That’s actually how this review started. Before I even beat the prologue, I was swinging my axe at an enemy and accidentally knocked down a tree, but more on that later, onto the game for now.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

I’ll definitely have to say that the graphics of Immortals Fenyx Rising are very good, though they weren’t as good as when the game first came out, especially on the Switch. I remember talking about how bad the game was pre launch from a visual standpoint. People talked about how there was lots of lag and the game just didn’t look as great on the Switch, kind of like how the Witcher 3 runs on Switch.

But then there was a patch right before the game launched and then another one shortly after the game came out that made it look so much better. Of course, it’s not going to look as epic as it does on next gen consoles like the PS5 but for a Switch game, it looks fantastic. It’s a lot like Breath of the Wild when it comes to visuals, and in some cases it’s even better.

The aspect of the graphics section that I love the most is the animation and cutscenes. All you have to do is watch the opening animation all the way to the point where you first take control of Fenyx and you can see for yourself how good it looks. The scene where you’re first introduced to Typhon really looks like it’s straight out of a movie theater, and all the other cutscenes are pretty good too.

My next most favorite aspect is simply how the world looks and how smooth everything can be at times. I love jumping off of a high area and gliding wherever I want. You get to watch all the different landmarks and all the different structures and parts of the world go by and it all just looks so pretty. It’s full of color with so much detail too, and everything’s so close to each other.

In Breath of the Wild, there was a lot more space. That’s not a bad thing, it meant more exploring and more ground to cover. But in Immortals, you get to see everything at once, in all its glory.

There are of course some drawbacks here and there, and one of the big ones is that you can’t really see stuff that’s really far away. For instance if you’re standing at the Hall of Gods, you can pretty much see everything. But at the same time, you can’t. If you look at the stuff that’s really far away, they start to lose detail.

It’s like half of the image rendered in or like there’s a level of fog or haze covering the area. You still get to see it though, it’s just not as clear as you would like, and once you get closer, things will be more in focus, so that’s good.

There are also a couple of times where I’m on the fence when it comes to character design. Many of the characters look awesome, like nearly all the enemies and all the gods. Everything you fight has a good level of design and effort put into it, but there are some times where the animation of Fenyx just looks weird, and don’t even get me started on those eyes, they’re just weird.

Also, while we’re on the topic of enemies, I’m going to have to talk about the actual combat itself. The physical art of battling is amazing. Later on I’m going to talk a bit about one of the aspects of battling that I don’t like, but from the visual standpoint and gameplay, it’s as good as it can possibly be.

The battle animations all work together perfectly, whether it’s just you and one enemy or you’re surrounded by 6 things trying to kill you. Your own actions look good and run very smoothly and so does all the actions of everyone else, making combat, especially the fast-paced battles, very clean and good looking.

Overall, I think the graphics of Immortals Fenyx Rising are amazing and I would definitely say that this is one of the best looking games that we have on the Switch right now, especially when it comes to grand open world games like this one. Even with its quirks, I still think it looks awesome.

Granted, the game does look and run so much better on other consoles. If I was reviewing the PS5 version of the game I would have easily given the graphics section a perfect 10 out of 10, with some extra credit even, but for the Switch version, I’m going to give it a very solid 9 out of 10.

SOUND: 10/10

The sound of Immortals Fenyx Rising is definitely one of the biggest and best aspects of the game. You got the generic sounds of the game, the voice acting, and the music, and the voice acting is really where the game shines so let’s talk about that first. Every character is fully voiced, and I mean fully voiced. Each of the Gods, all the other characters, and Fenyx has a ton of lines and they are all flawlessly delivered, especially when you look at all the little parts of this aspect.

There’s always some character cracking jokes or saying something funny, or there’s a very serious moment and the way their lines are delivered really packs a punch. For me, the strongest part of the voice acting is the humor and the way that all the voice actors delivered their jokes. I really feel that if there wasn’t as much humor in the game, the voice acting probably wouldn’t have been as great. As such, I’ll talk a bit more about the humor of the game later on in the review.

When it comes to the cast of Immortals, there’s a decent amount of star power throughout the game which is also one of the reasons why this aspect shines. The female version of Fenyx is voiced by Elana Dunkelman. She’s a Ubisoft regular as she’s done some work on multiple Assassin’s Creed games. The male version of Fenyx is voiced by Tyrone Savage who’s also worked on Assassin’s Creed as well as Total Drama.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that every single voice actor or very close to all of them have appeared in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Prometheus was voiced by Elias Toufexis, who obviously appeared in 6 different Assassin’s Creed games but also worked on Death Stranding, Fornite, Fallout 4, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and Sea of Thieves.

All of the other characters are voiced by people with a dozen plus acting credits and all did a great job with their roles. I’m sure that if any of these roles ended up going to someone else, I don’t think the experience would have been as great.

As for the music, it’s just as good. When I looked up the music of Immortals in order to work on this section, the sheer amount of music really threw me off guard. Granted, it’s a really big game with lots of areas so you would expect a big soundtrack, but when I found the official soundtrack on Youtube posted by Ubisoft Music, I noticed that the entire video was nearly 3 and a half hours, which is crazy and my research told me that there were more than 60 full length songs in total.

By full length I actually mean full length songs, which is another thing that surprised me. When I was looking at the list of songs on Youtube, there were 70 and none of them were under a minute, with many going for 2 to 6 minutes. I liked this because in most soundtracks there’s only a handful of full length songs, with most of the tunes being very short.

Heck, look at the soundtrack for Pokemon Sword and Shield. These games had a lot of music but in total, the entire soundtrack clocked in at a whole 51 minutes shorter than the Immortals soundtrack and featured 27 different tracks that were 30 seconds or less. If you were to take the number of songs in the Immortals soundtrack coupled with how long the songs themselves were, you’d have enough content for 3 or 4 full sized albums. That’s impressive on it’s own.

Another impressive feat when it comes to the music of Immortals is physically who did the music. When you’re talking about who a composer is, it’s usually just one person for indie games or small to mid sized AAA games. You have guys like Christopher Larkin doing the music for Hollow Knight and Greg Edmonson doing it for the Uncharted games. But then when you’re talking about the really big blockbuster games, one person usually isn’t enough for that amount of music and a team of composers is usually involved.

Take Breath of the Wild for instance, the soundtrack was designed and programed by a team of 16 people and was composed by 3 people. Now when it comes to Immortals, there’s no way to tell how many people were involved with the designs, programs, editing, etc, but it was all composed by one person. The entire nearly 4 hour long soundtrack was done by Gareth Coker. Composing one standard sized game by yourself is alone a pretty good feat but doing so on such a massive game is a major accomplishment.

Coker actually happens to be one of the big-shots in the gaming industry so you know he’s good at his job too, he’s done the soundtracks for Ori and the Blind Forest and it’s sequel, Ark: Survival Evolved and it’s sequel and animated show, Darksiders: Genesis, and even the upcoming Halo Infinite. He’s also done the music for many of the mythology expansion packs in Minecraft, which made him perfect for Immortals.

As for the music itself, it’s very good and enjoyable. One thing that I really liked about the soundtrack was the diversity in themes. There was a healthy balance of songs that were action oriented and full of energy, songs that are slow, epic, powerful, and emotional, and song that are calm and relaxing. They all played an important role in bringing the world to life and making it feel and sound wonderful.

One of my favorite songs from the soundtrack happens to be one of the ones that you hear close to the start of the game and is called Trouble in the Clashing Rocks. It’s a quick paced track with a ton of fun instruments that was full of energy and action. It really had the time period of Immortals in mind too and really painted a picture as to what this world was about.

Another track that I really enjoyed is called Art of Warfare. This one isn’t really as energetic as the other and is a bit slower but throughout most of the song, it actually has a tune that you can follow along to and is pretty catchy. I like it and it’s because of this that I would associate this song with being the actual theme for Immortals.

I also really enjoyed Hermes’s Tale because of how epic and dramatic it is and Phronesis because of how calm and relaxing it is. The game’s soundtrack really does have something for everyone and checks off so many boxes for checking whether or not a soundtrack is great. The game doesn’t feature any songs that are truly iconic but features dozens that are either good or great and that makes the entire soundtrack as a whole really amazing.

It’s also really nice when a soundtrack can make you think of other composers/soundtracks. There were plenty of times where I felt Ramin Djwandi vibes (Game of Thrones, Warcraft) and it made me appreciate what I was listening to even more.

I’ve already talked so much about the sounds of the game but I haven’t even talked about the sound. There’s the voice acting, there’s the music, and lastly there are the regular sounds of the game. When talking about the regular sounds of the game, they aren’t bad but they definitely take the back seat with the other two aspects of sound being far ahead.

But what does the regular sounds have to offer? They make the game feel a lot more realistic and really help bring you into the game. For instance when I was running along the beach near the Hall of Gods, I was able to hear everything. I heard my steps, I heard the water and the wind, even the birds, and they all sounded good.

All the different sounds that the different creatures make are all good too and the sounds of combat are good, especially when you’re battling multiple creatures at once because all you hear is the clang of metal, and I’m sure that there’s a bunch of random noises that I haven’t even discovered yet. The sound of Immortals as a whole is just so insanely good, and is a treat for your ears to listen to while you play.

It has everything going on for it sound wise, some of the best voice acting that I’ve ever heard in a game, especially on the Switch, well above average sound, and an A tier soundtrack that has had an insane amount of effort put into it. Not quite S tier soundtrack though. My overall grade for the sound of Immortals Fenyx Rising is going to be a perfect 10 out of 10 with just a little extra credit because of how grand it is.

ADDICTIVENESS: 9/10

Immortals Fenyx Rising is one of the few games where you just keep coming back for more. There’s so much to do to the point where you can easily put 100 hours into the game. I’m going to go into depth on all the things that you can do later on, but for now I want to talk about why it’s so much fun.

The game is a lot like Breath of the Wild, with so many features and gameplay mechanics that seem to be borrowed from that game. It’s not a bad thing, the game took inspiration from all the things that worked and threw Greek mythology at it. It really feels like Breath of the Wild meets Assassins Creed Odyssey.

But based on the kind of humor that’s seen throughout the game, I would kind of compare it more to Breath of the Wild meets Percy Jackson, and I have nothing wrong with that. If you like open world games like this or you like Greek mythology, then you’re going to have a blast playing Immortals. But what happens once you’ve beaten it? Are you going to move on to the next thing?

I hope not. Immortals is a game that’s fun enough that once you are done with it, you may still want to keep exploring the world, battling, and doing quests and challenges that you haven’t gotten to yet. Or you can do the New Game+, which allows you to start the game over with all of the abilities and stuff that you’ve already acquired. Or you can start New Game+ in a different difficulty setting, including a really hard one that’s only unlocked after you’ve beaten the game once, but more on that later.

Even if you’ve beaten the game once, there’s enough incentive to beat it a 2nd time, or even a 3rd time, and that’s not including the bunch of DLC that’s going to be added later on, which will add so much more content. If you’re on the fence about replayability or having a good time, then you should stop working about that right this instance.

Sure, maybe half way through you will get bored and move onto the next big thing. But the game is fun enough and grand enough that you will eventually pick it up again later on and finish it. Or you will beat it once and then down the line you will want to try it again on a new difficulty level or you will want to try out one of the DLC packs.

That also brings up the following point. Right now the game has lots of reason to keep playing and lots of replayabilty. But at the same time, the devs plan on adding so much more to the game in the future that will only enhance replayability in the future. So even if you’re on the fence about the game now, all you have to do it wait a little and then it will eventually become a no-brainer.

I personally think that the game has a lot to offer and that once you start playing, you won’t want to put it down for a while. There’s lots of replayability and for Addictiveness, I have to give this section another solid 9 out of 10.

STORY: 9/10

When it comes to the story of Immortals Fenyx Rising, there is simply just so much stuff that makes up the plot. I could probably talk about the story for like an hour without giving any major spoilers and I’d end up only scratching the story. Watch. So what is Immortals about? It’s about Fenyx, a mortal, who is basically chosen to become some sort of savior and save the world from destruction.

I chose to play as the female version of Fenyx, I’ll explain my thoughts on character customization later on. When you first take control of Fenyx, you basically crash land on some island and when you find everyone, you learn that they were all turned to stone, including your brother. You spend some time going around this starter area trying to piece together some info while also gathering cool tools like a sword and axe, both of which have some significance behind them.

Then you see someone being attacked by monsters and you try to save them. But first let me rewind a bit. Does this seem a bit too simple? Because it is. The game is in fact just a story told between two Gods, Zeus and Prometheus (who was imprisoned by Zeus.). The game starts off with Typhon, a crazy, dangerous giant. He’s the one who turned everyone to stone. He also kind of wants to destroy the world and in a way, kidnapped some of the Gods.

Zeus wants to beat him, so he goes to Prometheus, who believes that there’s going to be a mortal who stands up to Typhon and beats him. He then proceeds to tell Zeus how it’s done, in the form of a really long and narrative driven story, which happens to be the game. That’s right, the entire game is just a story being told to Zeus by Prometheus.

They make a bet. Prometheus says that if Fenyx does stop Typhon, then Zeus will free Prometheus and they will all live happily ever after because no more bad guy. But if Fenyx does not, then Prometheus agrees to help Zeus stop Typhon. So Prometheus tells the story of Fenyx’s journey, down to every last little detail, much to Zeus’ annoyance.

Parts of this confused me though. I’m assuming that all the narration is taking place in the past. It kind of implies that Prometheus gets a vision of the future and sees Fenyx going on her journey. This implies that Typhon was doing his big bad guy stuff, then Prometheus tells the story of Fenyx, and then they sit and wait for the events of Fenyx’ journey to actually take place.

That part doesn’t really make much sense to me because from the view of Fenyx, it makes it seem like their boat crashed, and then Typhon turned everyone to stone while Fenyx was unconscious. From Fenyx’ point of view, it kind of makes it look like Typhon did his bad guy stuff and then Fenyx started their journey immediately, there doesn’t seem to be enough time for Typhon to have already done damage before Zeus goes to Prometheus.

But let’s go back to the actual story shall we? As Fenyx, you explore the starting area, which is one of the 7 areas of this world and you chase down this guy that’s being harassed by birds. You also make your way to the Oracle, who gives you, obviously, a prophecy. This is the moment where the story really kicks everything off.

In this moment, you learn three big things. This is the point where you learn about Typhon and what he’s been doing to the world. You learn that you are some sort of chosen one who needs to stop Typhon. You also learn that the guy who you tried saving just stole one of your most valuable possessions! Oh and he’s also Hermes, you know, the God.

He tells you a little bit of what to do in order to save the other gods, sets you up with a really nice pair of wings, and tells you to get going on your adventure. I said a lot there didn’t I? You’re probably thinking that I just gave away most of the story, but guess what? All that stuff I just said was literally only the prologue of the game, it can all be completed in like 60 to 90 minutes and then the real story kicks off.

What’s the rest of the story like? Well I don’t want to reveal too much but it’s pretty much just finding the four gods that were affected by Typhon and trying to return them to their former glory. This is all while getting as strong as you can for your final battle with Typhon and completing dozens of challenges, dungeons, and all sorts of mini events.

There’s a lot to the game when it comes to story, and it’s just so good. You can tell that there was so much effort put into the writing and all the little things that went into the plot. There’s so much detail, it’s funny, emotional, and everything in between. I think the story is just amazing and I’m going to give this section another 9 out of 10.

I would have given the story a 10 but I don't really think that it would be perfect on its own. It's the little bits and pieces of other categories that make the story as good as it is. Without the humor, without the unique character interactions, without the amazing voice acting, I don't think the story would have been nearly as great as it is.

DEPTH: 10/10

When it comes to the depth of Immortals Fenyx Rising, you have to admit that there’s just so much to offer. 1st of all, the biggest way to measure the size and depth of a game is by the size of the world, and this game sure does have a huge world. I meant it’s not as big as the biggest gaming worlds out there, but I would think it’s easily the 2nd biggest on the Switch behind Breath of the Wild and one of the 20 biggest of all time, which is awesome.

I found this website called PowerPyx and they estimate that the size of the Immortals world is around 27 square kilometers. This is around half the size of the entire Breath of the Wild map, which apparently clocks in at around 60 square kilometers. If, buy size, the Immortals world is half the size, that’s very impressive and still means that the world is huge. There are just so many places to explore in the Golden Isle.

The smallest area in the world took me around an hour to fully explore and many of the 6 other areas are 3 to 4 times bigger in size. It’s a really big world with lots of stuff to do. Even if you were to take out all the story stuff and all the enemies and quests, just exploring the entire map would be a delight for some, and take many hours to do so.

If you do end up doing all the cool bonus stuff, you’re going to waste so many hours exploring each area and the best way to show that is by talking about Far Sight, which is one of Fenyx’ many skills. What is Far Sight? It’s a skill that basically lets you zoom in on the area around you and hunt for buried treasure. Before you use this skill for the first time, you will see nothing but quests around you.

But as you face different places, your Switch might start to vibrate and you will see a little change that indicates there is something nearby that wants to be discovered. Eventually, once you find exactly where the spot is, you get the option to reveal what it is, and then it will forever be on your map, and there’s a ton of these too, I mean a ton.

I was standing on top of a statue the first time that I used it in the 1st main area and I remember searching for things for around 10 minutes and found a ton. I thought I got them all but I quickly realized that the amount of stuff you can uncover is directly related to where you are and basically how far you can see. So once you unlock everything you can, all you have to do is take 100 steps in any direction and you might be able to unlock more secrets in the same area.

That’s what I did, I went from the statue to the Hall of Gods and then I found a bunch of other secrets and spent even more time unlocking them. In total, I spent 15 minutes in the valley area trying to uncover all the secrets and in total I uncovered 22 dungeons, 32 chests, 18 Ambrosia, and a bunch of other challenges and activities. Plus I’m pretty sure that there were still others in that area that alone that I missed.

Look beyond the size of the map and Far Sight and you’ll be surprised at how much there is to the depth of Immortals. There’s just so much to do, so let’s take some time to look over the best parts of the depth.

PHOTOS:

Lots of games now have some sort of a photo mode built in and Immortals Fenyx Rising. Now, the camera in Immortals is nowhere near perfect, it’s not even close to the photo system in games like Horizon Zero Dawn, but it’s still really good. Granted, you could always just use the Switches screenshot function, but the in game one has a few cool features to play around with to make sure you have the most perfect photo you can take.

Once you have the shot ready to go and lined up, there are lots of different things that you can tweak in order to make the photo look the way you want it to, and then once you have the perfect photo, then you can use the Switches screenshot function to save the photo for whatever you want to do with it.

There are 10 different sliders that you can mess with in order to create the photo of your dreams when you are editing. The first one is Depth of Field which is one of the most important aspects of taking real photos but I just don’t like the way it works in this system, so I never mess with it. Depth of Field allows you to mess with the focus so you can have one thing in the foreground and then you have the background. One will be crystal clear and the other will look blurry.

I just don’t like the way that the blur looks, I think it looks really bad and makes the part that’s blurred hard to look at. It’s called focus because you focus on the thing that’s clear but I can’t stop myself from looking at the blurry area and wanting to throw up.

Next up you have the exposure for brightness, this obviously just changes how much light there is, and I rarely see a reason to mess with this option except maybe when it’s night in game and you want it to be a bit brighter. The next 3 options all have to do with color and I rarely mess with them, they are contrast, temperature, and tint and all 3 can be summarized with the colors black, white, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

Then you can use those 3 sliders and the combination of the 6 colors to pretty much make any color you want. I don’t mess with these because when I take photos, whether they’re in the game or IRL, I want mine to look cool and realistic, so I don’t bother trying to make something that could look realistic bright neon green or cartoonish.

Next you have Saturation and Bloom, and I’m not really going to talk about these because all the times I tried to use them, I couldn’t figure out what they were doing in game. Next up you have noise, which gives the photo a grainy rough texture that makes it kind of look vintage and you have Vignette, which narrows what you see down to the center of the photo.

The last photo feature is called Fog, and this is by far my favorite of all the sliders and definitely one of the most useful. Sometimes you’re going to want an epic shot of Fenyx with all the glory of the world behind you. But other times maybe you want the entire background filled with fog because it gives a dramatic and cool effect to the photo. I loved messing with this feature. I would stand on a rock and put fog in everywhere behind me and it would look so cool and so creepy at the same time, it’s a nice feature.

Like I mentioned before, the entire system isn’t as great as in other games because there aren’t as many features and some of them just aren’t going to be used by that many people, but it’s still really cool and lots of fun trying to make sure that your photos come out perfectly and then you can save them and share them however you like. It’s also awesome that the new Nintendo Update came out right before this game did, where you can now upload screenshots directly to your phone and up to 10 at a time, which really helps if you love using your in game camera.

POSTGAME:

Well what is there to do once you beat the game? One thing that I noticed about beating the game is that you can’t actually return to the world once you beat the game. In most games you are able to beat the final boss or finish the game and then you can go back and keep doing whatever you want, whether it’s finishing any quests you missed or getting as strong as you can. Immortals does not allow that, once you enter the final boss battle and beat Typhon, it’s over.

So if there’s anything left that you want to do, you have to take care of it before that final battle. However, once you begin your battle with Typhon, the game will create another save slot that’s right before that battle. So, if you were to beat Typhon and end the game, you can just reload that final save state right before the battle and do whatever you want. In your eyes, you still beat the game but can still explore and do whatever you want. Of course, this isn’t the case if you get the season pass which adds a bunch of postgame stuff, but I’ll talk about that later on.

This makes me think back to one of my most favorite games of all time, Guardian’s Crusade. It worked the same way, once you beat the final boss the game was over, but I remember reloading that final save and continuing to play, explore, and battle for dozens of hours just because I had so much fun. It’s a big letdown to not be able to explore the world after you beat Typhon but it’s not a dealbreaker.

There are a number of “postgame” things that you are going to want to take care of before the completion of your playthrough, regardless of whether you do it before battling Typhon or reloading your saves. For instance you can work on the various daily and weekly challenges. These offer a new challenge every day and week so you will always be looking forward to something new even if you beat everything the game had to offer.

Another cool thing that you can focus on near the end of the game is hunting down and taming all the different horses that the game has to offer, which totals more than 2 dozen. There are a few that are really cool looking that you might want to add to your collection.

If you really do want to beat Typhon and end the game, then you have two options for what you can do next. The first is New Game+, which has become common in video games over the last few years. But what does New Game+ offer in Immortals? Well, in New Game+, you are basically starting the game over again but you keep pretty much everything that you had at the end of your previous play through.

All your horses, gear, wings, weapons rollover to the new file, and even your skills and boosts to health and stamina. So basically if you acquired every weapon in your first playthrough, you will start New Game+ and already be invincible, especially if you already maxed out all of your health and stamina.

Personally, I don’t really see a reason to do this for the casual player. If your goal was to explore the entire world all over again, you could do this by just reloading the save before Typhon’s battle and just explore and play in your previous playthrough. You would already have access to every part of the map and can fight every available enemy with all your weapons. By simply reloading the old save, you have access to the whole world without having to redo the entire story.

But obviously if you want to experience the story again, then that’s up to you and you would probably love New Game. However, there also happens to be a very challenging version of the game called Nightmare Mode, which can be accessed through New Game+. So instead of just starting the game over, you can start the game over but as a crazy person because of difficult it can get.

Nightmare Mode is actually so hard that the game kept fall damage and stamina regeneration at default levels because if they weren’t, the mode would literally be impossible. Other than that, there’s no health regeneration at all and the strength level of all enemies is much higher.

But if that’s your kind of jam, then you are probably going to get so much out of Immortals Fenyx Rising and beating the game twice and doing all of the extra endgame content should easily set you back more than 100 hours, especially with the increased enemy difficulty which will require more strategy.

ECONOMY:

One of the most common things to find in the world are blue shards. What are blue shards? Well, the currency and item system is something that I really like about the game because of how many different types there are. In most games, the formula is currency and skill points. Currency is obviously whatever money system the game uses and skill points level up skills or other attributes when you level up or do something.

In most games, upgrades are done using one or the other. You can buy upgrades and enhancements with money or whatever you put a skill point towards. Some games also have a regular form of currency plus a premium one that you get by spending real money. The 3rd type of system allows you to use items to strengthen or boost stuff.

Immortals is basically a mix of all 3 and then a whole lot more because there are all sorts of different forms of currencies that are used for different things and I think that's a really cool system. The ingenuity really made me think back to Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization.

That was one of my most favorite Switch games and when it came to the different ways to acquire and upgrade different things, it was a system that I really love. With Immortals, the blue shards are just one of the many ways that you can buy or upgrade things. In my opinion the blue shards are also one of the easiest to acquire because you can just get them by breaking stuff.

As I said before, these shards can be used to upgrade weapons, armor, and helmets. I racked up 139 blue shards after playing just 30 minutes and most of that playtime was just watching the opening cutscene. Granted, you do need a lot in order to upgrade stuff. The stuff you start with, the Axe of Atalanta and the Sword of Achilles each require 500 to upgrade. Not only that, but they also require 80 red shards in order to upgrade.

What is a red shard you may be wondering? Well it’s the 2nd form of skill currency. These are used to upgrade weapons and can be found from a variety of places like defeating certain enemies and from chests. Then, you have another main type of shard, which are the purple ones. These are used to upgrade armor and helmets and can be found from epic chests and other means. Put the 3 together and it makes for a unique mechanic.

You see, each thing, whether it’s weapon, armor, or helmet requires a primary currency and a secondary currency to upgrade. The blue shards are always the primary and every upgrade and every weapon requires them. But then the type of item dictates which secondary shard you need to spend. But wait, there’s more. You also have yellow shards.

These don’t actually have anything to do with your weapons and armor but you can spend these to enhance your carry capacity for things like potions and arrows. Then you have golden amber, which you can spend to upgrade the effects you get from potions. Then you have coins of charon, which are basically like regular skill points and are used to upgrade your skills and powers. There’s a total of 34 skills and 25 powers so if you want all of them, you better get collecting.

On top of all that, you also have a premium currency system, called credits. You start the game with 300 credits and you can buy a bunch more using real money. You can buy credits pretty much anywhere. You can buy them in the actual game, in the eshop, or you can even go to a store like Gamestop and physically buy credit packs. You pretty much get 100 credits for every $1 that you spend and you can get all sorts of bonuses for buying more at once. So if you were to buy say 5,000 credits for $50 you would get 1,500 extra for free. I’m not saying go out and buy that many, you don’t even have to buy any at all, but there sure is a lot of cool stuff that you can buy with credits.

By the time that I wrote this part, the game was only out for like a week, so at this time, I’m not sure if the stuff that you can get with credits rotates and you can buy new stuff later on, or if you’re just stuck with what there is to offer. The main thing you can buy with credits are character packs. These packs cost between 1,000 and 1,500 credits and come with all sorts of goodies. Each one comes with armor, a helmet, wings, a horse, and a Phoenix.

Some of these look really good based on the character pack because each one has its own color scheme and the current packs that are available include Typhon the Unchained, Orion the Stargazer, Hades the Shadowmaster, Poseidon the Wavebreaker, and Apollo the Radiant.

My personal favorite is the Apollo one because I love the mix of white, orange, and red. The cool thing about these packs is that you don’t have to buy the full packs, you can just buy each individual item in a pack, just remember that they don’t actually give you any sort of boosts, they are just visual customizations.

Just like the character packs, there are also weapon packs, which are also just for customization. There are six different weapon packs and each one comes with a unique skin for a sword, axe, and bow. Despite the fact that you have to pay for all these items and skins, I like them because they do add so much to the customization aspect of the game and could also imply that there will be more in the future.

They are pretty expensive though, so they would only be for the people who are really into unique skins and heavy customization. If you were to buy the $10 credit pack and add it to the 300 you start with, you wouldn’t even have enough for Typhon’s character pack. Buying all 5 character packs and all 6 weapon packs that the game started with would cost 10,310 credits, which would cost $85.

There is one other form of currency but you won’t unlock it until after you’ve played for a couple hours and unlocked the Hall of Gods, and there aren’t too many things that you can buy at once, but there’s usually a nice assortment. Once you reach the Hall of Gods, you can do a bunch of daily tasks that will get you varying amounts of this currency, called Elektrum.

Obviously since these are daily tasks, you only have so much time to complete it before it resets and you missed out, but they are usually pretty easy like fetching certain ingredients, or hunting certain enemies/animals. The daily rewards get you 30 Elektrum while there’s a weekly challenge that can get you a ton.

I wouldn’t suggest doing the weekly challenges right away though. They give you a ton of Elektrum, between 90 and 165, because of how hard they are, so I wouldn’t suggest trying these until you are much better at the game. You get 90 just for completing the challenge and 165 for beating it in under 1 minute and 44 seconds.

I never even beat it to begin with when I tried it. I must have died more than 20 times and by the time I was in there for more than 15 minutes, I just gave up because I couldn’t beat the last puzzle. Plus there’s no way to quit or restart these challenges. If you want to leave, you have to load your save.

You can use Elektrum to buy stuff from Hermes shop when you’re at the Hall of Gods. Speaking of the Hall of Gods, it’s a really cool place with a ton of things to do and buy, but it’s also a nightmare getting to. It’s located at the top of a really tall rock and there’s no path or road to get there, it’s just climbing straight up and it takes so long. I timed myself going from the very bottom to the very top and it took 1 minute and 40 seconds. Fast travel eventually becomes your best friend.

Hermes carries 5 items but the cool thing about his shop is that these items are only available for a week and then they rotate out to other items. I don’t know if older items will be coming back later on or if they’re gone for good if you forget to buy them.

During the first week that I played, the 4 items that were available to purchase with Elektrum were Armor of the Corrupted, Dawn’s Edge (Sword), Wings of Stars, and Starlight (another sword). Armor of the Corrupted happens to be one of the items from the Typhon character pack that is bought with credits, so it’s a nice touch being able to buy it with in-game currency and not having to spend real money, though waiting week after week for credit items to appear might seem a bit daunting.

All 4 looked really cool and ranged in price from 225 Elektrum to 450. The 5th item was Zeus’ Lightning, which is something than can boost your total stamina and is usually found in dungeons.

UBISOFT CONNECT:

Another cool aspect of Immortals Fenyx Rising that sort of ties in with the economy aspect is Ubisoft Connect. What is Ubisoft Connect? It’s kind of like an online service and networking thing that’s between Ubisoft games. Within Immortals, Ubisoft Connect has a number of things to offer.

When I checked out the service a few days after Christmas, I was pretty impressed by what it had to offer. There were challenges, rewards, and a stats page. At the time of writing and checking the page for the first time, the challenges page had 30 regular challenges and 5 time limited challenges.

Apparently I had 7 of the regular ones and 1 of the time limited ones already completed. They are confusing though. The time limited one I did said defeat cyclops and the goal was simply “50,000” and was listed as a “community challenge”. I had no idea what any of that meant. Was the 50,000 how much damage dealt? How many cyclops’ every player beat? Something else? I wouldn’t be able to answer that at all.

Apparently the goal was 50,000 but the number accumulated was over 2 million. The reward for completing that was 50 EXP and 500 Red Shards. Once I claimed the rewards, a new challenge appeared in its place that required beating 500,000 enemies with swords, which was already completed. Then I started thinking that the time limited ones were just what every player accumulates.

I was only able to claim rewards on 3 of the challenges that I completed and collected 125 EXP, 500 Red Shards, 500 Purple Shares, and 2 Lightning Bolts. It looks like the others that were completed just automatically gave EXP without having to collect, which seems weird to me.

Many of the challenges are very time consuming, so if you do them all, you could end up with hundreds of hours of gameplay. For instance there’s one challenge that’s to collect 100,000 total shards.

The only good thing you get out of leveling up is Units, which you can trade in for stuff, you get 10 for every level. In the rewards tab of Ubisoft Connect you use them to buy different thins of different rarity such as Rare, Epic, Exotic, and Legendary, but you need a lot of units to unlock some of these.

Lastly, the stats page is a pretty cool section. It shows a bunch of different stats such as hours played, enemies defeated, shards collected, distance traveled, mounts and weapons collected, and much more. You can also compare your Immortals stats to the stats of your friends if you have the app. All in all, I think this is a really cool part of the game, especially as they start adding more rewards and challenges later on.

POTIONS:

Another aspect that I really like about the game is the system of potions, which I think is incredibly unique, something that I have never personally seen in other games. In most games, there are two main ways to get potions other than finding them in the wild like in chests. The first is to simply buy them from stores and the second is to craft or cook some sort of ingredients to make the potion. That’s a pretty standard mechanic, and it’s the same in Immortals but with a huge twist because the potions themselves are very upgradable.

In most games the potions are just potions, you drink one and you get health back or you drink one and you get stamina back. In Immortals there are 4 types of potions that you can craft and not only do they really help out, but they can also be upgraded to be incredibly overpowered, in fact there’s a grand total of 32 upgrades that can be done to the 4 potions.

There’s the health potion which simply restores a small amount of health. There’s the Attack potion which increases damage for 90 seconds. There’s the Defense Potion which increases defense for 90 seconds. Lastly there’s the Stamina potion which will restore small amounts of stamina. The Health and Stamina potions can each be upgraded 4 times but the others can be upgraded 12 times each, resulting in a massive amount of boosts.

For example, the Attack potion has 3 paths that you can follow, which are “Stun”, “Damage”, and “Health”. If you were to unlock all 12 your Attack potions would be unstoppable. The first level of the Health path will restore 5% of one health bar when you attack an enemy. This goes up to 20% at level 4. The Damage path will cause increase your damage from 20% to 40% and the Stun one adds 15% stun.

So if you were to unlock all 12 Attack potion skills, each time you drink one Attack Potion, you would gain 100% damage, 60% stun, and 20% health recovery per hit for 90 seconds. At that point, all you have to do is carry like 6 Attack potions with you and you would be unstoppable for nearly 10 straight minutes. Of course, leveling up all the Attack potion skills would be really expensive and cost you more than 100 pieces of amber.

Next up you have your Defense potions which are just as strong and also has 3 paths, which are “reflect”, “resistance”, and “Thorns”. Level 1 Thorns inflicts 200 damage to enemies whenever they attack you, which itself sounds epic. Resistance increases your defense from the base 20% to 40%. Reflect reflects projectiles for 25% of their damage.

With a full unlock of all Defense potion skills, one potion would grant you 100% damage reflection from projectiles, 100% defense boost, and a 2140 damage hit to attacking enemies for 90 seconds. You use both a Attack Potion and a Defense potion at the same time and for 90 seconds you really will be a God.

If you fully level up your Health potions, then one potion will recover 15 health bars and lastly if you fully level up Stamina potions, one would recover 6 stamina bars.

This is an aspect of the game that I really like because it makes potions so much more valuable than just for healing and they add a level of strategy based on how many buffs are attached to them and where you use them.

SEASON PASS:

DLC is a fun topic to talk about because you obviously never know whether or not one is going to be good until after it’s out, even if it’s talked about a lot before it comes out. Take a look at the Pokemon Sword and Shield expansion pass, it received so much criticism for a number of different reasons before it was released and then after it came out, the 2nd half killed it.

Obviously there can be a lot of bad DLC out there, when it comes to either price or content, but there’s tons of really good ones too. That’s exactly where I assume that the Season Pass for Immortals is going to fall. In fact, I really believe that the season pass for Immortals can be one of the best expansion passes ever, despite the fact that they aren’t even out yet and might not be for a while.

I’ve played a lot of games, heck I have more than 200 Switch games alone. As a result of playing so many games, I’ve had my fair share of DLC experiences in total and in my own experience, I feel like the Breath of the Wild and Pokemon Sword and Shield expansion passes were the two best DLC packs that I have ever encountered. I feel like the pack for Immortals should end up being even better than those two once it’s out.

Well, for the price, I would definitely hope that the Immortals season pass packs a punch. Look at the Breath of the Wild expansion pass. It costs $20 and has two separate DLC’s that each have a lot to offer including new game modes, new challenges, more armor, and a few other small enhancements. For the $20 that you spend, the amount of content that you get is really a steal.

Next up you had the Pokemon Sword and Shield expansion pass which cost $10 more than the Breath of the Wild one. Sitting at a cool $30, this pass also has two DLC packs, but in general ended up having a lot more. In fact, leading up to this game, I would have thought that the Sword and Shield pass was the best DLC of all time because of all the things that it added.

The 2nd part of the pass, called Crown Tundra, added a bunch of Pokemon that weren’t available previously, so many legendaries from the older games, multiple new storylines that took one to two hours or more each, a new type of raid battle, a new tournament, and a large area to explore.
That one half of the expansion pass basically cost $15 and I spent more than 50 hours in the new area since it came out. As a whole, that $30 expansion pass was a beast.

Ubisoft is trying to one up both of those passes by making the Immortals season pass a whopping $40, that’s another $20 more than the Sword and Shield pass. Ubisoft is so confident in how good the season pass is that they aren’t even offering a discount for when you buy the game and season pass together, which is something that I’ve seen many games do in the past. Instead, the game costs $60 and the season pass costs $40 but if you were to buy them together, you get the Gold Edition, which still costs the same $100. But to be fair, you do get a bonus digital item or two by getting the full Gold Edition version of the game.

$40 is an insane price for a single season pass. Heck, $40 is two thirds of the full price of the game and the game has already gone on sale for $50 once or twice since being release a month ago. So in theory, you should be able to get nearly a full game worth of content out of this pass, in comparison to the game and price. But there are a couple indicators that prove that the Immortals season pass can be legendary and put the others to shame. The first indication is simply how many separate DLC packs there are in the season pass and the second is what we already know about the pass.

What do I mean by the number of DLC packs in the pass? Well, the Breath of the Wild expansion pass had two DLC packs for $20 and the Sword and Shield expansion pack also had two but for $30. The immortals season pass doesn’t, it has three DLC packs. That’s already a good indicator, the Immortals season pass has an advantage of a whole extra DLC pack over the other two, which does offer an explanation as to why it costs $40 opposed to $20 and $30.

In the grand scheme of things, that averaged out to $13.33 per DLC pack which is a little better than Sword and Shield’s $15 per pack but not as great as Breath of the Wild’s $10 per pack. Of course the number of DLC packs is never a good indication as to how much content the pass offers as a whole or whether or not the content in question is actually good. They could be 3 short DLC packs or 3 long ones that aren’t good. What makes the season pass for Immortals stand out?

So what do you actually get with the season pass? Well the first DLC Pack is called A New God, and before I start talking about it, I should probably warn you about spoilers because all of the DLC packs take place after the game ends. A New God is basically just an expansion to the story itself, it adds extra story that takes place after you beat Typhon as well as some new trials, and allows you to visit Olympos, which itself looks really cool.

It looks like this DLC Pack is going to be pretty big, but compared to the remaining two DLC packs, I would probably assume that this one is the weakest of the 3, which says a lot if I think this ons is going to be big. The second DLC Pack is probably going to end up being my favorite because of how much stuff it adds. This pack is called Myths of the Eastern Realm and offers something that I have never really seen in DLC before.

The second pack is very different from the 1st and is very different from the main game even because it looks like it actually has very little to do with the game to begin with. That’s right, Myths of the Eastern Realm is basically its own game that’s separate from Immortals Fenyx Rising. The main game is all about Greek mythology and you play as Fenyx as you explore the world known as the Golden isle, which itself is huge.

But Myths of the Eastern Realm isn’t about that, it doesn’t even take place in the same world. Not only does this DLC Pack take place in a whole new area that looks great but you also get to control a brand new character named Ku while taking part in a new and exciting story that revolves around Chinese mythology.

Remember back when I mentioned how the entire season pass costs $40 and how that’s basically two thirds of what the entire game cost? Well it’s basically looking like this DLC Pack could be it’s own smaller game inside of the larger Immortals game. When you break down the price of all 3 packs, it comes out to a little more than $13 each but if you’re talking about a new and original playable character, world, and story, that makes it sound like this one DLC Pack alone could be comparable to a $20 or $30 game, which impressive.

Over course, it’s very possible that the story is short and the new world isn’t as big as I think, but even if that’s the case, I’m sure you can expect greatness from this DLC pack, especially if the quality of the story is really good. If it’s short but the story is top notch, then I’m sure it will be more than worth it.

The 3rd DLC Pack is called The Lost Gods and follows a series of world ending events across the globe that are destroying cities, and to make matters worse some Gods have left Olympos, like retired I guess. Zeus forbids the odd from making contact with the ones who left, which would have helped a lot. This version of Zeus is still very much a paranoid and childish rebel by the way.

But just like how the main Immortals game was about the mortal Fenyx becoming a hero, The Lost Gods follows a new mortal called Ash who is recruited to save the world, yay. I like the way this story is shaping up to be because it’s about Ash going each of the Gods who abandoned Olympos and they all give their reasons for leaving as well as explaining that they hate Zeus, with good reason no less.

There are 5 Gods who left too, so that leaves for a lot of storytelling and character building when explaining each of their reasons for leaving and their feud with Zeus. This DLC Pack offers new kinds of gameplay and mechanics as well as new puzzles to solve in order to make sure that the rebel Gods return and save the world.

All 3 DLC packs sound like they pack a ton. In total there’s going to be 3 new stories, two new playable characters, a whole new world to explore (maybe 2) and so much more. Even if all 3 DLC’s are pretty short, I’m sure that when you put them all together they’ll make up for an entire games worth of content and playtime and that the quality of the content will be pretty good. Plus, if you preorder the season pass, you’re going to get a free bonus quest called When the Road Gets Rocky, so that’s cool.

But for fun, why don’t we guess how much time we’ll end up putting into each of the DLC packs to figure out whether or not the $40 price tag is worth it? I’m expecting the 1st DLC to be the shortest because it just seems to be new story stuff and not a lot of other stuff. I’d probably put this one at around 10 hours of content. I expect the 2nd DLC Pack to be the biggest mostly because of the fact that there’s going to be a new world to explore. Plus because there’s a new world and a new character, there’s going to be some amount of backstory. Because of this, I would expect the 2nd DLC Pack to run around 20 hours.

The 3rd DLC Pack also has a lot of new story stuff and a new playable character but there isn’t much that I can see in terms of the world and things to do, so I would expect it to be a roughly 15 hour campaign on average. Plus, obviously the amount of questing, exploring, and fighting will drastically change those numbers, but just by these expectations, I think that the entire season pass will be worth a base of around 40 to 50 hours. I obviously love open world games though, so I would end up being one of those people that pushes 100 hours.

A possible minimum of 40 to 50 hours worth of content for a $40 price tag is really good. According to howlongtobeat, Completionists were beating the main game in 40 to 60 hours last I checked, so adding another 40+ hours for $40 is a steal. Also, if you are one of those gamers who love challenges and play the Nightmare Mode after beating the game once, then you’re going to get a heck of a deal by paying $60 for the game and $40 for the season pass because you will basically be getting 3 full games worth of content, maybe more.

If you waited until after the game came to buy it, then that’s even better because during it’s first 2 weeks out it’s been on sale multiple times, including for $40 in a couple places right before Christmas. So if you were able to do that, you would have gotten the game for $40 and the season pass for $40, which would have been a really amazing combo for the $80 total.

DESTRUCTION:

Yet another aspect of Immortals that I like is the fact that much of the environment happens to be destructible. It's a very minor feature that offers very little but I think it's a really nice touch to the game. I wouldn't have even known that you could destroy the environment if I accidentally knocked over a pillar while fighting some enemies.

It was near the start of the game and I was fighting in this area that had lots of tall stone pillars. I hit one of them with my axe and it toppled over into a couple stone logs. Then when I would hit the stone log with my axe again, it would shatter into a bunch of small stones.

After I beat the enemies, I just ran around the area, swinging my axe at everything that looked like it could fall over. Stone pillars, tiny bushes, full size trees. They all fell over at the might of my axe. The trees needed to be hit three times in order for them to shatter into a million pieces though, but watching the carnage unfold was pretty fun.

The only downside is that it doesn't really serve a purpose other than looking cool. However, if you're lucky, you will get a couple blue shards to drop when you destroy something. Blue shards are very useful because they let you upgrade your weapons, armor, and helmets. But it's rare to find them from destroying stuff, I only got them like every 10 or so trees that I knocked over, so that's not a very profitable route.

You can also use the remains of trees to throw at enemies but I just find that doing this is too much work. If you can find a giant rock on the ground, you can pick it up and throw it at an enemy and it does a lot of damage but I would advise against destroying stuff to throw for 2 reasons. First of all, throwing things might not even be the best way to go despite the immense damage it does, because the enemies are usually moving. Also if you have to cut down a tree to get logs to throw, that’s just time consuming.

HUMOR:

All right, this has to be my favorite part of the game easily. If you’ve played just 5 minutes of the game or you watched any gameplay, you already know by now that the game is absolutely full of a unique sense of humor and there’s a lot of it. The obvious piece is the dialogue between Zeus and Prometheus. Prometheus is trying to tell the story of Fenyx and Zeus is basically acting like a bored and impatient kid throughout it.

Literally two hours into the game, the actual title of the game appears and the main game begins and Zeus goes on to make some joke about how that was just the prologue, and it’s hilarious.

I’ve also been loving all the interactions between Fenyx and Hermes. There’s a scene where there’s a joke about him playing with dolls, there’s another where he says he’s the God of financial gain but then contradicts that by also saying he’s the God of Thieves. Just within the first three or so hours of playing, I saw at least a dozen funny moments, nearly all of them were a result of some witty dialogue from one character or a hilarious, but also intended animation, like how Fenyx first approaches the cauldron in the Hall of Gods or how you open chests.

The type of humor actually made me think back to the Percy Jackson books, which I thought was cool since it was also about Greek mythology. One thing that I really liked about those books was the type of humor that was throughout the series and Immortals really made me think back to that.

Overall, when it comes to the total depth of Immortals Fenyx Rising, the game just has so much to offer. There’s such a big world with so many cool characters, terrifying creatures, places to explore, and things to do. Honestly, I probably only just scratched the surface when it comes to all the things that the game has to offer. At this point, I kind of feel obligated to give this category a perfect 10 out of 10 with just a little extra credit, yes I think it’s that good.

DIFFICULTY: 6

It is very difficult to pinpoint an actual grade for Immortals Fenyx Rising because you can make it as easy or as hard as you want it to be. The game itself is very straightforward and regardless of what difficulty you choose, the game will be easy if you are patient, know what you are doing, and you keep trying. But other than that, there are four main difficulties that you can choose from, which I think would drastically change the grade of difficulty between a 1 and a 7 if I rated each of them.

First you have the Story difficulty which is by far the easiest difficulty, even easier than easy mode. It’s for those of you who don’t want to worry too much about the actual gameplay and you just want to see the epic story play out in front of you, kind of like a visual novel but with better graphics. In this difficulty, there’s no fall damage, there’s lots of health and stamina regeneration, enemies are super weak, and you get tons of assistance.

Next up you have the easy mode. It’s not as easy as the story mode but it’s, uh, easy. In easy mode, enemies are stronger than in story mode but are still very weak. Fall damage is also cut in half and you get a slight boost to stamina regeneration but health regeneration is set to default. You also still get a small amount of assistance.

In the normal mode, everything is default. Enemies are regular difficulty which means they are going to take like 5 to 10 hits to kill near the start of the game, so that alone can be a problem until you upgrade everything. Other than that, everything is default and is the way that I would assume is the way you should play the game to begin with.

The last of the main difficulties is hard mode, and like the name implies, it’s hard. Enemies are a lot tougher and not only do you get no assistance at all, the time in which you have to complete stuff is decreased, making the game a lot harder, but still pretty manageable if you know what you are doing.

Once you beat the game at least once you unlock New Game+ mode and can play the game again in the Nightmare Mode difficulty. I’m not sure if you unlock that by beating any difficulty. I know some games don’t allow you to unlock New Game+ or any of the extra stuff if you beat the game on story or easy mode.

Nightmare Mode is exactly what it sounds like. Enemies are incredibly strong, they can take you out in 1 hit if you aren’t prepared and buffed enough. There is also no health regeneration at all, so there will be plenty of times where the game just screws you over. Lastly, the time you have to complete challenges is decreased even more, making this mode a literal nightmare when you take everything into consideration.

This is why I hesitated to simply give the game a difficulty grade based on what I experienced in my main play-through. I would personally give the Story mode a 1 It’s very easy but you still have to do the fighting and stuff, regardless of how easy the enemies are. I would give the easy mode a 3 and the Normal mode a 6. Normal mode is still a little big harder than what I would consider average.

Then I would give Hard mode a 7 because there isn’t that much of a big difference other than the strength of the enemies, which you can bypass with better strategy. Lastly, I give Nightmare mode a full 10 on difficulty because it’s nearly impossible. At times this mode can feel like Breath of the Wild meets Dark Souls.

Personally I wasn’t really a fan of how “tough” the enemies were near the start of my play through on Normal mode. It wasn’t difficult but I feel like it was too time consuming and there were two things that I noticed that did make it slightly difficult. Because it’s an open world game, there were plenty of times where I would just casually enter an area and there was an overpowered enemy there waiting to take me down.

During those instances I would either fight very slowly and take lots of damage along the way and I’d eventually kill them after a few minutes and 6 potions, or I would run away and hope that I can get strong enough to kill them later on. This happened far too often for my taste though. The other thing that I noticed is that because of how many hits it takes to kill enemies near the start, it can make attacking groups of enemies a chore.

There were plenty of times where I would be fighting say 4 enemies at once and I would be attacking 1 or 2 at once and it would take a few hits just to knock them down and a few more to kill them. I didn’t like this because I would have to put time into the ones that I was attacking and as a result, the other enemies in the cluster that I wasn’t attacking could sneak up and attack me while I was attacking the others.

Sure it’s pretty easy to switch who you are attacking but that leaves you open too. If you’re attacking an enemy and you see another is about to attack you, you can switch your attack to the other one but then the one you were just attacking can attack you. Timing is key and having to spend 15 to 20 seconds on each enemy can cost you some health in the long run.

But other than that, the game is very manageable if you know what you’re doing. If you see an enemy that’s clearly a lot stronger you can either run away and grind until you have enough skills and potions to take them on. Or you can attack them slowly, get a couple attacks in and then retreat, but be prepared for this to take a long time. The games difficulty is entirely up to you.

For grade purposes, I’ll give difficulty a 6 which is on par with my own experience but it will obviously change based on how you want to play the game and what options you choose before you even start playing.

ASSASSIN’S CREED: ODYSSEY 2?

This isn’t either a pro or a con, but I wanted to point this out. I’ve never seen an official original game that was so heavily inspired by another game. Sure there are plenty of games that ripoff other games or are inspired by another game or are fan games, but this one takes the cake. It’s essentially Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey 2. I’ve already talked quite a bit about Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey throughout the review. I’ve mentioned how it’s developed by the same team and how pretty much the entire voice cast has worked on Odyssey.

But the rabbit hole is so much deeper than that. For starters I’m sure you all heard of there story of how Immortals was created in the first place? It was inspired by a glitch in Odyssey. There was a bug where your crew of humans would somehow be replaced with a crew of Cyclops’. One of the developers thought that was cool and was like “what if we make a whole game out of that?”

They also made it so that you could download specific clothing and customization options that can make you look like the characters from Odyssey. Plus this is in addition to lots of mechanics and quests that resemble those found in Odyssey. I know, it’s a crazy world we live in.

CONSTANTLY UPDATED?

Another crazy thing that I really like about the game is that it looks like it’s going to be constantly updated, like a lot. We already have the season pass with 3 new DLC packs, but there’s all sorts of updates going on to either fix stuff or add stuff. Literally just 2 weeks after the game came out, there was an Adventure Time update, which added an Adventure Time character pack that you could buy with credits. In total, you can spend 1,500 credits, which is about $15 and you get armor and a helmet based on Finn, a horse based on Lady Rainicorn, special wings, and a Jake companion.

Heck, I knew about that because it was announced and marketed, but Ubisoft even went on to surprise release an extra character pack after I already checked all of them out, called The Conjuring Alchemist, which I thought looked cool. There was even a free character pack that was given to anyone who had Amazon Prime. It’s called the Ice Champion collection and was released the day after the game came out.

Plus, to further drive home the point that Ubisoft cares about the game and updating it, on the same day that they released the Adventure Time update, they released a patch and then a 2nd patch the same day, with around 10 improvements between the 2.

WHAT DON’T I LIKE?

What about stuff that I don’t like about Immortals Fenyx Rising? For me, the game is as perfect as it can be in many areas but there are still a few small issues that I have with the game, whether it’s with the technology, the gameplay, or whatever. Here are a couple things about the game that I either dislike or I wish would be changed.

For starters, as far as I can tell there’s no way to quit a dungeon. If you have begun a dungeon, there’s no way to leave and go back to the overworked unless you go through the entire dungeon and beat it. Well, there is a way, but that’s by reloading your most recent save. I never actually bothered to check if the game autosaves when you enter dungeons, which would be cool, but if not then reloading a save might be out of the question if you have done a lot since your most recent save.

Even if you have a save state that was right before the dungeon, you’ll lose all the items that you have collected while in the dungeon if you load the game again, which would really be a shame. This is especially true in dungeons where you’re facing a bunch of enemies because you can collect large amounts of blue shards that you might not want to lose. I was furious at the game when I found out about this. I already mentioned this a little earlier when I was talking about the weekly challenge, but I also had another experience.

I had just beat a dungeon and I ended up going right back in just to test out whether or not you can redo dungeons over and over again, which it turns out you can. But there was no way to simply quit the dungeon and at the time, I didn’t think that I had a save state right before I entered. Plus, I definitely wasn’t going to do the dungeon all over again at the time because there were a lot of enemies and it took a long time to beat the first time.

So I simply paused the game and put the switch away until I was ready to put the time into the same dungeon again. That’s something that I really wish was a part of the game, the ability to simply exit a dungeon or challenge, I really believe that would be so helpful.

The next thing that I really dislike is the fact that you can’t record videos. You can use the Switches ability to take screenshots but you aren’t able to able to take videos. There have been plenty of times when I wanted to take a video or two, probably a dozen times or more. There were times I wanted to record clips for the purpose of writing this review, so that I would have some of the story dialogue and main plot points ready to talk about.

There were also a bunch of parts that I thought were really cool or funny, but it simply said that you can’t record, and I really can’t tell why Ubisoft would have such a big deal with people recording 30 second gameplay videos. This hurts me a lot because I’m someone who loves recording and saving clips. A month ago before I had to start making space on my Micro SD card, you would have easily seen 30 to 40 videos of me doing well on Smite, or a dozen videos of Minecraft builds, or 100+ videos of Pokemon battles and raids.

The only option to get around this would be to use a capture card but there’s no way I’m going to set up my capture card and connect it and the Switch to a computer and run OBS just so I can capture a few 30 second clip every now and then. It’s way too much work and it defeats the purpose of capturing really good in the moment moments. I don’t know why recording would be something that Ubisoft is against but I’m fully a believer that this is something that needs to be fixed.

Next up are the load times, especially the one when you first start up the game and are waiting to get into the main menu. Obviously there will always be load times and they usually aren’t a problem but apparently the game does connect to the internet as well as Ubisoft’s services. So it creates a dynamic similar to a mobile game. You know those mobile games, where they’ll be like checking for update or they take forever to actually connect to the network or game server.

That’s exactly what happens here sometimes, there were plenty of times where I had to wait an extra 15 to 30 seconds before I would even reach the main menu. Again, this isn’t a big problem, longer wait times are rarely negative and I don’t think I saw this happen during regular loading events, but it’s a small nuisance in the moment.

The 4th thing about Immortals that I’m not a big fan of are the strength of enemies and how often they show up. The strength and frequency of enemies was something that occasionally made me spend a few minutes where I just wasn’t having that much fun. For starters, most of the enemies seem to have a lot of health in relation to the amount of damage you do. For the few hours or so of playing, the basic enemies took like 5 to 10 attacks just to kill 1, and to me that felt like a chore at times.

I love fast paced games and spending 30 seconds on one mediocre enemy and a couple minutes on the stronger ones just wasn’t something that appealed to me at times, mostly when I was just fighting one enemy because it just became repetitive. It was a different story when there was a cluster of enemies and you can quickly shift between each one for some sick combat moves, that’s fun, but other than that I thought it was getting repetitive and dragged out.

Next I mentioned how often they showed up, and that also has to do with how much I love quick action. At times there just seems to be a lot of empty space between the areas that enemies are in. Sometimes I’ll beat all the enemies and then I’m in the mood to keep fighting but I have to travel like 100 meters or more to where the next cluster of enemies is located. At times that can pull you out of the mood and create a couple short moments where things get a tiny bit dull.

Next up we have the customization options for Fenyx, which is something that I think Ubisoft butchered. It looks like they tried to get the right formula for character customization by having a decent amount while not going overboard and this is what I think killed this aspect. Normally I’m a huge fan of customization and can talk for hours about how good a game is in this area, but not today.

There aren’t that many options to work with when you’re creating your character. You get to choose a gender, skin color, and hair and then that’s pretty much it. I don’t think each area even had a dozen options to choose from either. Like I said earlier, Ubisoft tried to meet in the middle by giving some customization options but not overdoing it.

But I think they should have done one or the other. I think they should have either gone all in with a ton of options or just not give us any customization options at all. If we had full power over what our character looks like, that would have been really cool. In moat games you are allowed to customization a lot more than just skin color and hair, and that kind of freedom would have really made the game feel a lot more personal and depending on how deep the options went, could have made the game more fun even.

Or they could have gone with the option of not even letting us customize Fenyx, which I thought would have worked fine too. You see, I didn’t even know that you could choose your gender until I played the game for myself. All the promotional material, trailers, and gameplay videos showcased Fenyx in the same character design. I thought that was cool but then I got the game and was forced to create something new.

I personally think it would have been better had they just stuck with one character design with no customization options, just keep Fenyx consistent with the design that was used in all the trailers and such. If Ubisoft had taken that kind of route, it would have made me think of games like Horizon Zero Dawn, and I really loved the way the game tackled that aspect. But instead we’re given the option to make something new but barely given any options, which isn’t something that I was a big fan of.

Climbing walls and other structures in the game can also be a real pain sometimes, for multiple reasons no less. For starters, climbing is so slow. Sometimes I would start climbing up a wall and sometimes it’s so slow that I begin to worry whether I’ll actually make it up to the next platform before I run out of stamina. There were plenty of times where I would make it half way up the wall and then I’d be out of stamina and fall, realizing that I just wasted time by trying to climb that specific wall to begin with.

One way to speed up your climb is by jumping. I don’t mean by jumping off the wall but by jumping up it, which is exactly like breath of the wild. The way you do it in Breath of the Wild is you climb and you can just launch yourself up a bit and that helps you cover a lot of wall. But in Immortals it’s not as great or as useful as it sounds.

Jumping up the wall only covers a short distance and still uses a decent amount of stamina to do so. The only thing this helps with is saving time and the amount of time saved is very small, and that’s only if you have enough stamina saved up. I found out that if I climb a wall and then try jumping all the way to the top, I might lose my stamina and fall off before I even reach it. But there were times where I would climb up the same wall and make it with some stamina to spare, having only lost a second or two.

The other way to jump is simply jumping off of the wall you’re trying to climb. This is an action that you’re taught early on in the game. You can jump off the wall and then do a double jump with your wings to gain some height. This really does help you cover a lot of height and makes climbing up walls so much quicker, but only if it’s work, and the double jump also uses up a tiny bit of stamina so keep that in mind.

What do I mean when I say it’s great when it works? I mean it might not work to begin with. For starters you can’t even jump off of the wall while you’re moving. You have to stop climbing and just hang there, then jump, then perform the double jump and start climbing again. In that span of 1 to 2 seconds, there are quite a few things that could go wrong.

After you stop climbing to perform the jump, you will keep losing stamina for as long as you you hang to the wall before jumping so you have to fully come to a stop and then jump quickly to limit loss of stamina. The timer doesn’t stop there because after you jump you will start falling so by the time you actually do the double jump, you will have lost some ground from falling. So even if you do a successful jump, it won’t really be all that great because you will still lose a little extra stamina and the distance you cover won’t be an insane improvement because you’ll lose some ground from falling for a split second.

Plus there will be sometimes where you grab the wrong thing. You’ll be climbing and your character suddenly starts going the wrong way or you get to the top but Fenyx won’t actually pull themself up right away, or you’re trying to climb one wall but you keep attaching yourself to something else for some reason. There’s lots that can go wrong with climbing.

Lastly, I absolutely hate the fact that while you’re riding on a horse, you can’t get the horse to jump. This is a given in many videos games. You can jump while riding a horse in Minecraft, Red Dead Redemption II, and most notably, Breath of the Wild. I’m sure this ability has been embedded into nearly every gamer in the world by now because it’s become one of the most important things to do while riding a horse.

Hey look there’s a rock, jump over it. What about that water over there? JUMP OVER IT. What if you’re just restless? Jump non stop for 30 seconds, nobody’s going to tell you not to. But if you try to jump in Immortals, your character will jump, but the horse will not. To make matters worse, your character will jump in place usually and be moving forward slower than the horse, so there will be plenty of times where you simply land on the ground with the horse 20 meters away,

It is fairly easy to jump and then land back on the horse but that’s nothing compared to being able to have the actual horse jump. It’s something that’s not only very useful in game, but also something that gamers need in order to keep their sanity and I can’t believe that a game that has more than 2 dozen horse breeds would not include this simple function.

OVERALL: 9.7/10

In general, it’s going to be pretty hard to find other Switch games that I like more than this one. I’m not going to call this one of my most favorite Switch games that I’ve ever played because there are a bunch of small games I’ve played that I loved so much for a number of different reasons such as Golf Story, Stardew Valley, and Cat Quest. But I will say that it’s without a doubt one of the biggest and best Switch games that I’ve played.

I definitely feel like this could be one of the top 3 biggest and best games on the Switch along with Breath of the Wild and whatever else you think is just as good. That’s saying a lot too, coming from the guy who has more than 225 Switch games in his collection. Of course, I haven’t played all of them but out of all the ones that I have, Immortals is just such a big accomplishment compared to many of those.

Actually, forget the Switch. I’ll probably go as far and say that this is one of the biggest and best games made in a while, and that would probably be more true when talking about the game on a different console with the better graphics and such. I think it’s awesome on the Switch but I obviously know it’s so much better on other consoles like the PS5, which probably means that the game is even better than what I’m saying.

If you love Breath of the Wild or even other open world action adventure games like Skyrim, Horizon Zero Dawn, The Witcher 3, or even Assassin’s Creed, then Immortals Fenyx Rising is a game that you are probably going to really enjoy playing, on whatever console you get it for, it doesn’t have to be the Switch.

The game just has so much to offer, including a great story, some of the best music and voice acting, top notch humor, and so many things to do on the side. If you were to speed run the game and beat it in 20 hours, you still would have gotten a pretty darn good experience and 20 hours is still a good chunk of time.

But if you take your time and you marvel in how awesome the game looks and how many things there are to do, and you beat it and then try your hand at Nightmare Mode, you could be looking at dozens of hours. If you do all that and you still get the season pass, then oh boy are you in for a treat as you could easily find yourself occupied for well over 100 total hours, if not more.

If you were able to get the game for $40 when it was on sale, then that would have been a steal but if you still don’t have it and you have to pay $60 for it, like I did, then you shouldn’t hesitate and should pick it up right now because it’s an awesome game. I’m 100% sure that if the game had been released earlier, it would have been a serious contender to win Game of the Year, it’s the good.

Overall, I really do think that whoever reads this should go out and buy the game, it will be well worth whatever price you pay for it. My overall grade for Immortals Fenyx Rising, with the little bits and pieces of extra credit and negatives that I dished out here and there is going to be an amazing 9.7 out of 10, which is the highest grade that I’ve ever given to a Switch game. I love the game so much that I actually regretted buying it for the Switch and wish I had bought the PS4 version that comes with the free PS5 version instead. So a few days before Christmas, I bought a 2nd copy to keep sealed.

GRAPHICS: 9

SOUND: 10

ADDICTIVENESS: 9

STORY: 9

DEPTH: 10

PROS: +2

CONS: -1

DIFFICULTY: 6

OVERALL: 9.7/10