Immortals of Aveum was the latest game to immediately spark my interest with a surprise reveal at The Game Awards, but after a cinematic trailer teased its existence, the studio behind it immediately went radio silent. Even though the EA Original is set to launch this year, developer Ascendant Studios has kept details about its upcoming first-person shooter close to the chest these past few months. I finally got a chance to see what the game looks like in action during a preview event, and it appears to be just the game to scratch my itch for a story-driven single-player shooter. Plus, Gina Torres (Destiny 2’s Ikora Rey and Transformers: Prime’s Airachnid) voices one of the main characters, and my geeky little heart is ecstatic.
In Immortals of Aveum, you play as Jak, a person who discovers he’s Unforeseen–which is a fancy way of saying you unexpectedly develop magic powers as an adult way later than most people do. He also discovers he has the special talent of being able to wield all forces of magic, chaining different abilities together in devastating combinations. Jak is quickly trained as a battlemage under General Kirkan and enlisted into a seemingly endless war between two factions who are each vying for total control of Aveum’s magic.
Bret Robbins (known for his work on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Advanced Warfare, and WWII) serves as Immortals of Aveum’s game director, which likely informs how a game that sees you play as a battlemage matches the action hero exploits of a Call of Duty. The game’s magic is certainly more colorful and flashy than any Call of Duty gun, but Jak carves each spell out of the air with runes that seem to explode with the same frenetic punch as a bullet, and Jak responds to orders barked over a magical sending stone with the same dry sarcasm as a soldier speaking into a radio. So while it looks quite different from a military shooter, there’s a familiarity to the whole thing as well.
