I remember looking forward to Ascendant Studios’ Immortals of Aveum when it came out, though I have to admit I didn’t buy it at launch. (I buy very few games at launch since almost every game that comes out gets patched post-launch, and of course quickly comes down in price). When it hit Playstation Plus a year or so ago I jumped in and played for maybe 5 hours before I got distracted. I can’t in all honesty say exactly why I quit playing back then.

But recently I decided to give it another go. This time I played about a dozen hours before bouncing off it, and this time I deleted it from my hard drive. It’s the only way I’ve found to give myself ‘closure’ on a game I’m not enjoying. If it is still installed I’ll constantly go back to give it ‘1 more try’ and then wind up frustrated/disappointed again.

Lately I’ve been struggling with forcing myself to finish games I’m not enjoying all that much, just to say I’ve finished them. Frankly, life is too damned short, and the supply of good games too plentiful, for that kind of behavior. So this is me trying to be better about making gaming enjoyable for myself.

I doubt I’ll ever go back to Immortals of Aveum even though I am kind of interested in how the story eneded. My reasons for stopping break down into two broad categories: Me problems, and Game problems.

First the Me problems. Immortals of Aveum is basically a first person shooter, only with magic spells rather than guns and bullets. I’ve kind of lost my love for FPS in general, though honestly for a while the game was interesting enough to overcome that. What I really liked were the game’s environments which felt organic and fully realized, at least as fully realized as a world fractured by magic can be. But the wilderness felt like wilderness and cities and towns felt like real places that people actually lived in. The game rewards exploration too as there are crates and puzzles to find all over the place. Combat was actually pretty fun though they do throw a lot of techniques at you. If you play the game straight through it’ll be fine as they give you a tool, give you some time to use it and get used to it, then give you your next tool. But coming back to it after a year away? I was totally lost and had to start over. But these days run and gun FPS start giving me headaches after I play for a while, and this one was no exception (oddly I can play something like Skyrim and not have any issues… I think it is the speed of your typical FPS that causes me issues, and this was never a problem when I was younger).

The second Me problem was the protagonist, Jak (pictured at the top of this post). He was a sarcastic, wise-cracking kid who went from street thief to a major player in a war due to his sudden manifestation of magical powers (the world of Aveum is divided into folks who can use magic and folk who can’t. Jak goes from “no magic” to “I can use ALL the magic” which makes him special). The character doesn’t have a shred of humility and arrogance always rubs me the wrong way, so I really did not like the character I was playing. When you meet a woman who is philosophically opposed to your way of life and she says something like “Too bad you’re on the wrong side; you’re kind of hot.” I was just done with this game. This asshole does NOT need to have his ego fed! This is obviously 100% subjective, and you might really like Jak.

Now on to the Game problems.

I was playing on PlayStation with a controller and I just could not get the controls tweaked to a point where they felt good. Early on you can mostly spray and pray and there’re even spells that have ‘homing shots’ to make this even more viable. But as you get further in there are puzzles that require precise aiming at different targets with a very short time window to hit them all, and constantly missing because the controls feel either too touchy or too sluggish just felt frustrating. If you decide to play this on PC with mouse and keyboard, this may not be an issue for you (and there’s a demo on Steam if you want to test that out). I thought I could acclimate but when I hadn’t after 12 hours, I figured I never would.

Worse than that, after about 10 hours into my game I started getting errors popping up on screen when I’d changed zones. I could fix these by leaving the game, doing a force quit, and re-loading, but each time it happened I’d stress out that my save had become corrupted or something. In the end I decided I didn’t like the game enough to keep putting up with these errors, and since Ascendant Studios is all but gone, if it isn’t completely gone, there’s very little hope that this issue will ever get patched. When I had this issue like 3 times in one play session I decided the universe was sending me a message and that it was time to move on to something I’d enjoy without a bunch of caveats.

So that was it for Immortals of Aveum, for me. Time is too precious to spend too much of it on games that are “OK except for…”. When I find myself with nothing else to play I’ll go back and re-visit some of these “OK” games, though I honestly doubt I’ll ever get to that point because new really good games are coming out all the time. I am glad I tried it, and if you’re at all interested I’d again point you at the demo on Steam to see if it is more up your alley. I know I’m not the only one who had error issues on PlayStation but I’m not sure how widespread they are, but I would caution folks against buying on PS. I’m not sure how well the Xbox version performs.

Anyway, on to the next game. I’m going to give another somewhat maligned game, Saints Row (the most recent one) a go next. [It’s another PlayStation Plus Extra game that has been on the service for a while so I would expect it to be pulled soon.] We’ll see how that goes. Basically I’m killing time waiting for Death Stranding 2 to come out in about a month, so I don’t want to get involved in anything epic right now!

[Little update on this. I found a great YouTube channel called Gamer’s Little Playground. This channel takes games and boils them down into movies, basically. They have a video for Immortals of Aveum that’s 4.5 hours long and it includes all the dialog and cut scenes but none of the travel and very little of the combat. I’ve been watching it (well, the 2nd half of it as I was about half-way through the game when I quit) and while I’m still not done, I’m pretty content with no having continued playing as Jak continues to be a huge jerk IMO. Anyway it’s a great way to soothe my curiosity without having to slog through the 2nd half of the game. Huzzah!]