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Immortals Fenyx Rising

If you thought Breath of the Wild was one of the best games ever, but wish it was running on proper gaming hardware and not a glorifed mobile phone, this is the game for you. From the makers of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, this is what they're capable of when given full freedom to build a high fantasy game instead of another franchise title. It's an unashamed mix of Assassin's Creed and Breath of the Wild that just works perfectly. I love the art style, and the whole game is very light hearted and humorous. There's an absolute ton of stuff to do, combat is satisfying and exploration is rewarding with plenty of puzzles.

Pros

  • The whole game is bright and colourful. Not just the actual colours, but the voice acting, combat and animations all scream "happy weekend!"
  • There's a character creation
  • It's running on the AC engine, but with stylized graphics, which means it's really solid and runs well
  • The game is a story told by Prometheus, with commentary from Zeus. Pretty funny dialogue, It's hilarious when Zeus just goes "Bored now! A monster appears!" and a fight starts
  • You learn god powers which are used for both combat and puzzle solving. They're really tactile and give you a ton of options for combat
  • You have a sword, axe and bow for different attack options
  • There are stun mechanics so the more you build that up, eventually the enemy will be stunned and you can do a load of uninterrupted damage to them
  • There's a similar parry/dodge mechanic to AC (orange to parry, or red for an attack that must be dodged)
  • You learn to sprint pretty early on
  • You can climb everything
  • Lots of currencies for the different upgrade types (weapons, armour, capacity, potions, health, stamina, abilities, god powers)
  • Legendary boss battles that reward you with new abilities
  • Lots of different weapons and armour bonuses that change your stats and give lots of different bonuses
  • Exploration is rewarding. There's stuff all over the map, and lots of set pieces with tiny hidden side quests from lore
  • Lots and lots of puzzles
  • Most objects can be destroyed, cut down or thrown
  • You don't just get randomly given a mount or buy one, you can tame various wild creatures
  • Vaults of Tartarus work the same way as Shrines in BotW - physics or combat puzzles with a reward that increases your stamina, or extra gear
  • You can kill enemies by hurling rocks at them
  • Map traversal is really fluid. There are fast travel points, you can sprint, summon a mount, leap off the mount and double jump, and glide

Cons

  • There's a quest order annoyance/bug towards the end. One quest says you have to re-ignite hephaestos' forge, but that's impossible to do until you've done the regional quest with the automaton, because there's an invisible wall blocking the forge.
  • Even on normal, enemies can be a bit health-spongey for most of the game. Then towards the end when you're fully powered up, most things die in a few hits
  • A fair amount of the puzzles can simply be bypassed either with God powers, or thinking outside the box. For example, outside puzzles that are meant to be done with the nearby weighted cubes locked behind a door with a switch can just be skipped by finding a nearby heavy rock instead
  • Just like AC, my map is littered with other players' screenshots (which thankfully you can turn off, and it remembers your settings)
  • I get why they're in there, but I don't care about the cosmetics. Each set of armour can have 5 different apperances, and you find those extra visuals as rewards in chests. You can also buy them from the premium store etc
  • Just like AC Valhalla, you get "Checking for additional content" every time for ages on startup
  • Also similar to AC, there are several collectibles on the map which you can't get to until a certain quest. It's an open world collectathon - do not put icons on the map that I can't get yet
  • There's a store for cosmetics
  • Same control problem as AC. Controller is nicer for everything, but the game makes heavy use of the bow & arrow, which is way better on a mouse
  • I'm not a big fan of the scouting mechanic. I like uncovering points of interest, but waving the mouse around wildly looking for hidden indicators gives me a headache
  • The God powers don't have one-key inputs, you have to press a modifier key first, then the number, which makes them pretty annoying to use during movement and combat. There were so many times where I used a potion by mistake (1-4) instead of a god power (ctrl, then 1-4)
  • Gods and Monsters was a much better title. Changing the title because Monster Energy complained is laughable, and pathetic on Monster's part.
  • Never used the axe; it's way too slow to be useful
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