Immortals Fenyx Rising - Assassin's Cartoon of The Wild

Clearly they wanted to get in on some of that sweet Guilty Gear 2 Overture cash.

When the season pass was announced they had already said that the 3rd DLC would play differently, and have a different protagonist and everything.

Yes, but DLC normally doesn’t turn it into a completely different game. Changing the perspective from 3rd person over the shoulder to overhead isometric and changing combat is a pretty big deal.

Agreed. It is a pretty big deal, and it is the kind of risky stuff that Ubisoft will try every once in a while. The fact that this is DLC gives them some leeway in terms of “failing”, but if it works, they will probably make a whole game out of it, or insert this kind of experiment in other places.

Oddly enough, ACG has reviewed the new DLC:

It’s a pretty interesting change and makes me think that Fenyx is their “let’s try it!” game.

I think that was the biggest problem with the original Fenyx - it clearly was aping Breath of the Wild but not that much. They added bits and bobs to the game that BoTW had, but also kept, maybe a majority, of Ubi-game as well. Now they decide, let’s make it like Diablo!, and now we have a Diablo game. That lack of commitment to what exactly Fenyx is other than just “Video Game” i would hazard to guess shows that they don’t actually have any strong compelling reasons to make Fenyx anything. It’s like a “post-modern” game, game design beyond the idea of game design where function is a given and form is just ad hoc. Where you have a developer that makes games and here is a game that plays like a game, and we can make it play like any game you want. Got any ideas how you want the game to play? Send us a comment in our forums!

The extreme distance of the camera clearly makes it look like an ARPG, which seems even stranger.

Does Ubisoft get a pass for enforcing online in a singleplayer game? Not in my book! Playing on PS4. What is this shit? I need to connect to my ubisoft account? Why??

Also, when the game is loaded to the main menu, it checks for ages for DLC. I don’t care. Hide this shit in the shop menu. Why do they bother me with their garbage?

This game better be good. I have it on disc, I just want to throw it out of the window.

Yeah, Ubi has their own gameplay points system, with unlockable game doodads on their app. For that to happen, they demand online. On the bright side, you can get a nice batch of potion ingredients early on if you want to take the time to unlock them.

if you check for online components, you better do it in the background and don’t spoil the user experience. I will now wait until I get a new ubisoft game (until I forget), which could be 6 months at least.

That was a nice experience, the prolog. And the weapons don’t break! And the exploration is literally rewarding.

The precision/dexterity requirements are really starting to grate on me with this game. I love the narrative, the acting, the art style, the exploration, the progression, and the combat. Heck, I even enjoy some of the puzzles, when they actually make you think. But far too often “puzzle” is really code for “obstacle course” or “situation where the solution is obvious but hard to execute” and it’s just coming up more and more frequently as I play. I really don’t want to quite mid game but I notice my sessions are getting shorter and shorter and virtually always end with me frustrated about some precision bit of flying/jumping/box moving/whatever.

This is not a problem that ever comes up in Assassin’s Creed (completely different things make me quit those games in irritation).

Yeah, many shrines in Fenyx are actually platforming challenges instead of puzzles. And some can be pretty hard to pull off. I had my share of difficulties, but I like platformers, so they didn’t grate on me as much. That said, in a couple places I was nearly rage quitting, and I rarely do that. But those were the exceptions, not the rule.

Thank you, I don’t know why the proper term hadn’t fully crystallized for me but that’s exactly what it is and exactly why I’m not enjoying them. I stopped playing platformers a long time ago…

They have Mario level ambitions for their level design but they don’t have Mario level controls to go along with it. Very frustrating.

They also have a tendency to offer up shrines that can only be completed with a certain power without making it clear that that’s the case. There’s been at least 3 times where I’ve sat in a shrine for 10 min trying to figure it out only to google and be told I need a certain skill to progress. That’s not cool in an open world game.

This is true. In most cases, shrines that need a certain power to be completed will only be accessible if you have that power. But the same isn’t true of the optional parts of said shrines (extra chests, etc). Some of those can only be accessed if you have some other power (and in some cases you might not know there is such a power and just be left thinking it’s impossible), and that can be frustrating. I know it happened to me a few times, enough that I ended up leaving many shrines for later in the game, when I had most powers unlocked.

This may have been patched. I’ve gotten messages on several occasions explicitly telling me “the chest you’re trying to get can only be accessed with a power you don’t have.”

If you don’t enjoy platforming challenges, don’t even try to play the first DLC for Fenyx. The other two would probably be fine, but the first one is 80% platforming challenges that happen to be more challenging than nearly anything in the base game.

Got it. Honestly, I’m far from certain I’m going to play to the end, or even much further than where I am, so I don’t think DLC is going to be an issue anyway.

I’d say just skip the shrines you don’t want to play and go back to the main game or to a different shrine. There are plenty of those and most stuff in shrines is optional. The final section in the game is a long shrine-like maze, but it’s a lot more puzzle than platforming, and the platforming in the mandatory areas of the game is a lot more forgiving than many of the shrines.