AAA gaming’s MCU era gets its own Eternals as Ascendant Studios’ debut game doesn’t make its “Call of Duty with magic” concept sing.
When Immortals of Aveum was revealed last year, director Bret Robbins described Ascendant Studios’ first project as a “fantasy version” of Call of Duty, swapping helicopters for dragons and rocket-propelled grenades for fireballs. I initially thought this was just a clever bit of marketing, seeing as Robbins previously worked on Call of Duty at Sledgehammer Games, but after playing through Immortals of Aveum, I’m amazed at just how fitting this characterization turned out to be.
It’s not that Immortals of Aveum is a 1-to-1 replica of Call of Duty, of course. While the focus on elite soldiers influencing a larger conflict and several explosive set-pieces could have been pulled directly from Activision’s military propaganda simulator, doing away with real-world weapons of war in favor of magical spells allowed Ascendant Studios to expand the battle-tested formula both aesthetically and mechanically. The end result, however, winds up being yet another silly AAA mishmash of self-serious narrative tropes and tortuous Whedon-speak, only with shiny wizard gauntlets instead of traditional firearms.
Immortals of Aveum puts you in the shoes of Jak, an unforeseen — a magic user whose mystical powers surprisingly (and sometimes violently) manifest later in life rather than being nurtured from childhood — who finds his life as a teenage street urchin upended after he’s conscripted into the Everwar, an ageless conflict between the ruling nations of Aveum. Jak is special in that he can wield blue, red, and green magic rather than specializing in one color like most folks, and as such, he’s eventually promoted from the rank and file to the Immortals, a sort of wizard special ops team composed of the best and most powerful magicians in his home country’s army.
