Immortals of Aveum Gameplay Preview: Boomer Caster

There are no guns allowed in Immortals of Aveum, but they seem to be there in spirit. Published by EA Originals, the upcoming debut title from Ascendant Studios joins a small niche of magic-centered “first-person spell-shooters,” calling back to the likes of Heretic, HeXen and maybe even 2014’s lesser-known Lichdom: Battlemage. The action largely centers on arena combat against enemies from a safe spell-casting distance, with some light platforming and basic puzzle-solving to round things out. Steeped in original lore and an attractive high-tech/fantasy backdrop, the world of Aveum is a multi-continent landscape of various kingdoms locked in the “Everwar,” a deadlocked conflict between the battlemages of two unified factions.

EA invited Screen Rant to try out a preview slice of Immortals of Aveum and explore its decayed war-torn locales from the vantage of Jak (Darren Barnett), an Immortal trainee upstart who ticks a lot of boxes from the cookie-cutter “chosen one” trope. As a “Triarch,” Jak is uniquely privileged to learn all three of Aveum’s primary magic types: Force, Chaos, and Life, presented as blue, red, and green spells, respectively. Curiously, our demo primarily titled these categories by colors rather than their formal names but, regardless, they loosely function as rifles, shotguns, and homing machine guns.

Related: Immortals of Aveum Preview: A Magical FPS

A Brand New “Boomer Caster”

It’s an effective shorthand, for better and for worse, to align with the superpowered boomer shooter they are built around. As implied by its previous trailers, Immortals of Aveum eschews guns for spells equipped to Jak’s right hand as “sigils,” magic-infused gauntlets that wield one color at a given time. Flipping through equipped sigils is synonymous with swapping between guns in a typical FPS, and they even need to be essentially “reloaded” between “clips.”

Action feels occasionally reminiscent of Doom: Eternal in its brightest moments, in that aggressive play is prioritized and the player remains largely outnumbered. Our Immortals of Aveum preview centered on targeting frequently spawning enemies, courting cooldowns, swapping sigils for increased damage, and looking for secrets off the beaten path during downtime.

Unfortunately, it makes for a routine experience which deflates some novelty from the premise, but also kept the action feeling pleasantly familiar. A tutorial area has General Kirkan (a motion-captured Gina Rodriguez) train Jak in the particulars of combat and exchange exposition as the smartass protagonist quips fly freely. Most enemies fire shots from a distance while melee varieties rush the player, and righthanded spells do the bulk of the damage while the left hand activates utilities like a shield, stun laser, and magical whip.

An Interrupted Power Fantasy

Fury powers draw from a limited pool of mana, letting Jak crack open enemy barriers with the seismic Shatter spell or annihilate multiple enemies at once with an AOE blast, while ammo for the main “guns” appears to be unlimited. It translates to a pick-up-and-play combat flow that makes sense right away – pick off foes, create space, unleash heavy damage, disengage as needed – but the Immortals of Aveum preview rarely imparted the power fantasy one might expect from controlling a master sorcerer.

Maybe this is why the story positions Jak as an elite soldier but sees him fighting alongside grunts on the battlefield. Immortals of Aveum’s developers compare their titular Immortals to Navy Seals, which qualifies the boots-on-the-ground approach, but may miss the target for players who’d prefer to master varied magic systems and roleplay an all-powerful wizard…allowing for the fact that Jak could grow and become more OP later in the game.

Cue the Fireworks

Immortals of Aveum also has a problem to address with its visual noise. Spell projectiles produce cascading particle effects that blanket every encounter in colored light, which hampers visibility while never returning weighty, impactful feedback from direct attacks. Fury powers like Shatter are equally blinding but carry more oomph, it’s just hard not to want more reactive results from the primary spells.

Outside the ongoing light show, the world design in Immortals of Aveum is quite varied and detailed. An early level showcases the vast scale of the Everwar, with massive colossus-like statues dramatically positioned in the distance as floating enemy warship carriers bear down from the heavens with reinforcements. The later biomes we encountered were familiar but finely rendered, featuring crumbled architecture, geometric formations overgrown with exotic flora, and high-tech gates nestled among quaint mountain cabins.

In Need of a Few More Moves

Player mobility was a sore spot in this preview, especially when compared to the creative positioning required in Doom: Eternal. Players can double-jump, hover, and blink a short distance to avoid damage, but are not able to mantle over platform edges, a feature which has become all-but-assured in modern FPS games. In our Immortals of Aveum preview, there were numerous situations where a double-jump failed to clear the intended distance to a ledge, leaving our hero to sadly slide down a wall while enemies continued focus-firing from behind.

However, it’s still possible that additional movement techniques are left to be revealed later on in the story. Immortals of Aveum frequently traps Jak in combat arenas with replenishing enemies, so having a wall-run or other stylish maneuver to escape or engage targets would greatly improve the game feel as it stands. Regardless, healing crystals were plentiful, and we rarely saw a game over screen on standard difficulty; left-click-spamming mobs proved an effective, but hardly dynamic, strategy throughout.

A Mix of Gameplay And No Microtransactions

This speaks to the Immortals of Aveum preview’s dearth of diversified gameplay. Most battles resolved in similar fashion by tracking enemies, melting their shields or yanking them from cover with the whip, swapping to red spells when enemies got too close, then back to blue for distance, and so on. Since only one colored sigil can be equipped at a time, the primary “guns” can’t synergize, and the available lefthanded abilities never prompted unique situations or rewarded experimentation.

The climactic scene of the preview led to a boss fight against a giant “construct,” a type of magical golem which serves as Immortals of Aveum’s version of robots (some of whom are helpful to the player). To defeat it, we blasted at some embedded colored gems with corresponding spells to reveal a weak point; hardly a worthwhile encounter, and sadly comparable to the few other bosses found in the preview.

Levels were primarily linear, with a few detours from the main path to gear and currency rewards locked behind simplistic puzzles. A forge system lets players source additional equipment with currency, and – despite gear rarity ratings – Ascendant have been upfront about avoiding any looter-shooter systems or microtransactions, similar to the statements which accompanied Outriders at launch back in 2021. It’s always heartening to see this type of push, and Immortals of Aveum’s basic architecture could have easily been leveraged for P2W schemes or financed cosmetics.

Final Thoughts on the Preview

In its present state, Immortals of Aveum seems hungry for a distinct sense of character, something which isn’t sated by the sarcastic quips and comments of its Whedonesque protagonist. It looks as sharp as its screenshots, but the numerous particle effects often obscure the action, and combat spells don’t land with the weight they deserve. Gameplay is straightforward and the spellcasting is easy to get to terms with, but might also feel too similar to gunplay in any other FPS, albeit with some helpful lefthanded abilities and powers. The militaristic fantasy setting only strains the comparisons further, and Immortals of Aveum will need more than magical glamour to make its guns disappear.

Immortals of Aveum releases on July 20 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Screen Rant attended a special preview event for the purpose of this coverage.