November 2023 Ubisoft invited players to find out which company games they have played the most over the past few years. I don’t know about you, but most of my acquaintances had Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which takes about 100 hours to master. And the minds of the developers from the studio Ubisoft quebec so captured Ancient Greece that their new project Immortals Fenyx Rising dedicated to the myths of the Olympian gods.
Ubisoft’s new brainchild is a fusion of Assassin’s Creed and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild… The first Fenyx Rising got the basics of the combat system and elements of the live service. From the second – the concept of the world and the emphasis on dungeons and physics puzzles.
The story begins with the main character / heroine named Phoenix being shipwrecked and on the Golden Island, chosen by the Olympian gods. However, the latter have a serious problem: the giant Typhon got out of his dungeon in Tartarus in order to deal with Zeus and his entourage once and for all. The villain has captured valuable artifacts, subdued great heroes, and captivated or severely weakened the Olympians. Only the thunder god remained unharmed, who seeks help from Prometheus chained to the rock.
Phoenix will have to defeat Typhon sitting in the center of the map, having previously returned the lost forces to Athena, Ares, Aphrodite and Hephaestus, each of which has its own region.
Despite the gloomy plot, the game itself is executed in an ironic manner. Zeus and Prometheus regularly wedge themselves into the narrative, and the characters love to break through the fourth wall. However, the scriptwriters failed to maintain a single style. This is especially true of jokes that range from banter about the Mediterranean diet to jokes below the belt and Aphrodite’s reasoning that on Olympus over the past thousand years everyone has slept with each other several times. All is crowned by the central theme about the problems of fathers and children, which is served through many hours of pouring crap on Zeus. He is reminded of drunkenness, debauchery, harassment, bullying of family members and so on.
Modern trends have also not spared the new brainchild of Ubisoft Quebec. Phoenix is given a change in appearance and gender at any time, turning him into at least a green-skinned girl with luxurious sideburns and the voice of a young man, and the characters can mention the peculiarities of the culture of the ancient Greeks and non-binary characters in myths. The Thunderer generally dries up according to Achilles.
The main difference between Fenyx Rising and Breath of the Wild lies in the much less emphasis on exploring the surrounding area. The main character still has the ability to scan the area as an assassin, thanks to which we can mark in advance all points of interest around the character. True, this is implemented much worse than in Assassin’s Creed, so the player will regularly blunt, trying to figure out where the chest with loot is of interest to him.
What remains of Nintendo’s creation is a great emphasis on various puzzles and physics-based riddles. Various tags, mechanisms, closed storage and tests for accuracy, speed and so on are generously scattered around the map. The analogues of the Sanctuaries from Zelda, which are labyrinths and obstacle courses with puzzles, have not gone anywhere either.
However, here the Canadian-French team is still inferior to the Japanese geniuses led by Eiji Aionuma, who have perfected the art of creating unusual dungeons with riddles for years. And this is perfectly visible. Where everything in Breath of the Wild is done with the smallest attention to detail in terms of game design, in Fenyx Rising a mess of ideas can slip through.
For example, the brainchild of Ubisoft has an analogue of the magnet from The Legend of Zelda – Hercules gloves. But with their help, it will not work to put the object accurately, because the developers only allow it to be put in front of you or thrown forward. The interactivity in Fenyx Rising is also inferior to what players might have experienced in Breath of the Wild. Yes, it is possible to cut down some trees, but it makes little sense.
