As far as pantheons go, the Greek gods were a total mess. They were petty, vindictive, horny, destructive, and all around trash fire deities whose myths are wildly entertaining to this day. The Greek pantheon has been explored in video games before, most notably with the original God of War series, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey DLC, and Hades, but Immortals Fenyx Rising is the first to offer a fully open world immersed in the Kronos family bullshit from sky to seabed.
In Immortals Fenyx Rising the player is Fenyx, a shield bearer and storyteller who washes up on a beach to find the rest of humanity has been turned to stone after the titan Typhon won an apocalyptic battle against the gods and heroes of legend. Fenyx’s mission is to reassemble the gods for a second crack at Typhon, a task that takes them across the monster and puzzle-laden landscape of the Golden Isle.
Though the heart of Immortals Fenyx Rising is a straightforward and somewhat predictable hero story, its fantastically well researched deep dive into the Greek gods’ flawed characters and mythology makes the game fresh, funny, and unique. There aren’t many games where knowing the twelve labors of Herakles comes in handy, nor are there many where the narrators discuss nonbinary gods and make jokes about how centaurs are basically “sexy horse people.”
With a tremendously voiced and hilarious cast of characters, scenic vistas, engaging exploration and mostly on-point gameplay, Immortals Fenyx Rising is as fun and weird as those gorgon-creating, swan-banging, wife-eating gods themselves.
Sing to Me, Muse…
When the backdrop of your story is the entirety of Greek mythology, it’s hard to stand out.
Image: Ubisoft
People looking for a gripping tale centered around the protagonist should adjust their expectations in favor of ‘Immortals Fenyx Rising‘s’ lighter, less cerebral take on the hero’s journey.
Greek myths contain a lot of material to draw on, and Immortals Fenyx Rising does its best to give everyone their due. The game is narrated by Prometheus (the Titan doomed to stay chained to a rock for the crime of giving mortals fire) and Zeus (the self-absorbed king of all the gods), who make an unlikely but successful comedic duo. Their banter as Fenyx encounters significant locations tied to certain myths is where most of the game’s excellent humor shines through (see: centaurs = sexy horse people joke. I was rolling).
It’s obvious that Ubisoft Quebec, the studio also responsible for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, has a great appreciation for mythology, but the game’s packed-in primers on the heroes and monsters of the past leave little room for surprise in the game’s main plot. As mentioned before, Fenyx’s story is relatively straightforward, but it’s also rather thin compared to the myths the game aspires to emulate.
I was fine with the formulaic plot and derived most of my story joy from listening to Prometheus and Zeus joke their way through some of my favorite legends. People looking for a gripping tale centered around the protagonist should adjust their expectations in favor of Immortals Fenyx Rising‘s lighter, less cerebral take on the hero’s journey.
The Realm of the Gods
A vacation in Aphrodite’s Valley of Eternal Spring sounds perfect right about now.
Image: Ubisoft
As seen in the screenshots of Immortals Fenyx Rising, the Golden Isle is one very pretty playground. The lush green fields of the Valley of Eternal Spring and the Grove of Kleos are littered with gleaming white shrines, colorful flowers, bright blue pools of water, and dramatic ruins that give those realms a feeling of godly perfection. Some of the other areas, like the barren wastelands of War’s Realm and The Forgelands, are a little more boring to look at, but that might be up to the player’s personal threshold for endless rocky outcroppings and…yeah, it’s mostly a lot of rocks.
The Valley of Eternal Spring and the Grove of Kleos are littered with gleaming white shrines and dramatic ruins that give those realms a feeling of godly perfection.
Unlocking each area requires climbing a statue of the zone’s associated god and surveying the map from a high point (hey, it’s a Ubisoft game), which leads to one of Immortals Fenyx Rising’s handful of gameplay misses. In order to find and mark points of interest like puzzles, Vaults of Tartarus, or chests, players have to manually scan the area with “Far Sight,” a mechanic that requires methodically honing in on those points with the controller. The spatial threshold for being able to reveal each point is extremely small, which gets frustrating when you know something is there but the controller won’t lock on to the dang thing unless you mouse over it for way too long.
Balancing out the lack of fun in the Far Sight mechanic are the many delightful ways to traverse the Isle’s areas, from flying with Fenyx’s Wings of Icarus, sprinting around and climbing stuff, or riding one of the world’s many adorable mounts. I’m not a horse person by any stretch of the word, but Immortals Fenyx Rising turns mount collection into an irresistible minigame by scattering rare horses like pegasi and unicorns in unlikely corners of the world, which makes taming and riding them way more satisfying knowing you got lucky enough to stumble upon a unique new friend.
The Ol’ Ancient Greek Beatdown
Take that, you…griffin? Probably a griffin.
Image: Ubisoft
The good news about Immortals Fenyx Rising’s combat is that it’s straightforward and enjoyable. There’s an on-screen combo meter, which makes chaining attacks with different weapons, nailing perfect dodges, and pulling off parries all the more satisfying; the combat animations are also visually stunning. When you kill something, they basically explode into slow-mo fireworks. It’s dope.
The bad news is that the game has some issues with scaling player power and enemy power in the early middle section of the game. Fenyx’s bow, axe, sword, and special godly abilities are all upgradable, but the pace at which those upgrades are acquired is outstripped by the first few boosts in health and damage enemies get as the game progresses. There came a point in my playthrough about seven hours in where Fenyx was getting absolutely wrecked by everything, and the method for getting stronger was bottlenecked behind being able to defeat more of those enemies.
I had to take the game down a difficulty level to grab a few more stamina and health bar upgrades before continuing with the main plot, and while there’s no shame in adjusting difficulty, the temporarily huge gap between Fenyx’s power and the environment felt uneven. Alternatively, I was just very bad at combat at this game until I got the hang of it. Your mileage may vary.
Hellenistic Headscratchers
‘Immortals Fenyx Rising’ shines in the puzzle department. Just like that last blue pearl you can’t find until you have a breakthrough 20 minutes later.
Image: Ubisoft
Aside from combat, Immortals Fenyx Rising’s second main gameplay focus is puzzles. These are a near unanimous triumph, which is great because players will spend a lot of time puzzling over the many headscratchers the game has to offer. Constellation Challenges are multi-part puzzles that require completing a series of smaller tasks to unlock blue stars for a pattern, Fresco Challenges are sliding image minigames, Odysseus Challenges require flawless bow and arrow control, Hermes offers traversal challenges… The list goes on.
Those who play ‘Immortals Fenyx Rising’ on Switch should be wary of joy-con drift. Drifting is annoying in some games but catastrophic in this one.
Aside from the above puzzles, which are encountered in the wild of the Golden Isle as Fenyx travels and keep the island’s environment interesting, there are Vaults of Tartarus, which are instanced chambers heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild’s shrines. These offer some of the game’s biggest challenges and stumped me more than once, but having that eureka moment and realizing what needs to be done to finally reach a Vault’s treasure is very satisfying.
While the Vault puzzles are fun, a small gripe I had with them is how much of a player’s success is tied to movement within each vault. Solving a puzzle is one thing, but it’s perilously easy to do everything right and trip off the side of a cliff right when things were going your way.
On a related note: Those who play Immortals Fenyx Rising on Switch should be wary of joy-con drift. Drifting is annoying in some games but catastrophic in this one for aforementioned cliff-tripping reasons.
Adventure Ga-Lore
I thought gods would be, I don’t know, taller?
Image: Ubisoft
As an admitted lover of Greek myths (I was one of those Myth Kids in middle school and never stopped), Immortals Fenyx Rising was the funny, irreverent take on the messy, messy gods I didn’t know I wanted. After a few months of playing games with higher stakes and serious aspirations, picking up a light, happy open world game and smacking around a few cyclopes was a genuinely delightful distraction. I almost wish I didn’t have to review it, since its contained puzzles and simple plot are probably better played in bite-sized sessions.
I started out playing on a Nintendo Switch handheld for the first 15 hours and swapped halfway through to playing on the PlayStation 5. The Switch was great for pick-up, put-down gameplay but doesn’t convey the scale and beauty of Immortals Fenyx Rising on its smaller screen (and also hazards that joy-con drift), while the PlayStation 5’s performance enhanced the graphical details that make the game’s animation so special.
And yes, while the Vaults, open world, stamina “wheel,” and climbing do liken this game to Breath of the Wild, playing Immortals Fenyx Rising made me realize that Breath of the Wild–like games are basically a subgenre of open world titles now. What makes Immortals Fenyx Rising interesting is watching another studio iterate on that subgenre, seeing how well that style meshes with Greek myth, and wondering what comes next in a gaming landscape that will undoubtedly try to move even further with those ideas.
Immortals Fenyx Rising isn’t a perfect; neither were the gods that make up the core of its story. That doesn’t make it any less fun to stab and puzzle Fenyx’s way through their immortal mess.
Immortals Fenyx Rising is available on Stadia, Xbox Series X, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.