Immortals of Aveum
Review
Immortals of Aveum, or Immorals of Aveum?
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
A View to Remember...
There's really no beating around the bush here. The performance quality of this game is horrendous, worse by far than nearly any comparable AAA game released this year. Even Forspoken, whose developers and/or publisher definitely needed remedial lessons in how to optimize a game, far outstrips the walking slideshow that all-too-often is Immortals of Aveum.
Even the steamy breath-obscured window that Rose slid her hand down during her and Jack's romantic excursion in James Cameron's hit 1997 film Titanic would pale in comparison to the baffling, brazen blur effect that, even when disabled through the game's options menu, continues to haunt the player like a malevolent spirit. That is, assuming the options menu itself doesn't choose to break on you when you least expect it.
In more than half of the instances where, for the purposes of this review, the game was booted up, the game, instead of defaulting to the main menu, would instead redirect to the options menu, except the page would appear completely blank, with only the background textures appearing visible. Upon the player attempting to back out, a pop-up would appear, asking the player to save their changes before leaving, even though the save button, along with all else, was no longer visible. Sometimes, the game would even refuse to back out at all, only responding to a forced "End Task" manual .exe termination via Task Manager.
Full transparency
This review was conducted on two separate rigs: a 2080 Nvidia GTX i7-7790k 16 GB desktop, using an internal 4 TB HDD, and a Nvidia 3080 laptop, using the same processor and RAM capacity, with a 1 TB SSD. According to the game's own Steam page, the former setup should be more than enough to meet the minimum listed specs, whereas the latter should almost completely fulfill the recommended specs, save for the fact that the laptop used here ran a 3080 RTX instead of a 3080Ti RTX, but the marginal performance advantages of the TI version over the base model would not play an enormous factor in this specific instance.
To compensate for the absence of the Ti, all graphical settings were fixed at a mix of high and low, with textures and other essentials set to high, whereas a few other components, like shadows, were set to low. The game was tested at both 1080p and 1440p, and the results were not promising. At 1080p, the game struggled mightily to maintain even a minimum 60 FPS, and would commonly experience frame drops and display other performance issues. At 1440p, one might as well have been playing an interactable slideshow as a game. Even during cutscenes, the player won't be safe.
The game bizarrely alternates between performing perfectly fine during some cutscenes, while during others, it lowers itself to a jarring 10-12 FPS, making the already-blurry human characters look and move like outdated animatronics from some bygone era.
Final Verdict:
If it functioned as intended, Immortals of Aveum would, in all likelihood, prove a passable, albeit mediocre, experience. Nothing in its story, gameplay design, etc., does anything to make it either worthy of praise or warranting condemnation. Its fall from grace comes exclusively from its inability to meet basic performance standards.
After forcing myself to play through the first hour or two, gritting my teeth through every stuttering parkour run and fight, praying the game's broken state wouldn't lead to my character's death yet again, I cannot in good consciousness give Immortals of Aveum even half-credit for meeting the lowest possible expectations.
It is a failure, plain and simple. While there is still hope that it can be salvaged, with time, that's no excuse for a launch like this. One can usually forgive a bad launch. However, it is far more difficult to forgive an unplayable launch...
2.0
fun score
Pros
It has a functional .exe file
Cons
It is functionally all but unplayable on any but the highest-tier PC rigs. Even then, it runs poorly.
