First things first:
- The game requires installing the Ubisoft launcher.
- There is an in-game cosmetics shop with micro-transactions.
- The Gold Edition includes all 3 story DLC's + one of each cosmetics type.
- There are online only daily challenges with in-game rewards like in live service/mobile games.
- There are in-game rewards for leveling up your Ubisoft account and spending the points.
- The game spends about 40 seconds checking for "additional content" every time you launch it.
- There are no Steam cloud saves, it syncs with Ubisoft cloud instead, which can be unreliable. Though, on the flipside the Ubisoft saves are cross-platform, so you can continue your playthrough on console and vice versa.
- Subjective, but the game loves to use the words "challenge", "reward", "unlocked" to prey on people with addictive personalities. E.g. there are quests that are literally DLC ads, you complete some platforming challenge and it will pop up a message saying "reward unlocked! go to the store to purchase DLC NAME to claim your reward!" (and I already had all DLC).
I normally don't play modern Ubisoft games, so all of the above was new to me. Granted, a lot of it can be ignored, but it's good to know these things in advance.
With that out of the way, the game itself is Ubisoft's take on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's formula, but the similarities are only skin-deep. There is free climbing (you can climb any vertical surface outside of the puzzle rooms, just like Spider-Man), you can glide across long distances, and there is an upgradeable stamina bar that limits both. But the game's design philosophy is entirely different, the world design in particular is not immersive at all. There are no settlements, traveling merchants (or any NPCs at all) or even roads, it's just chunks of land plumped down haphazardly. There is no rhyme or reason to any of it. The game won't funnel you naturally towards points of interest, won't make you curious about "what's over that hill", because it's all the same map markers and objectives everywhere you go. The basic gameplay loop is you climb up any elevation and scan your surroundings for map markers, then follow the compass and do the same 5 (or so) types of challenges over and over. In contrast, BOTW had no built-in map markers, you had to manually mark whatever looked interesting/odd, and you would have no idea what awaited you there. While in this game you just literally drag a cursor across the screen until it beeps (it's a wall hack btw, it sees through walls/mountains), press a button and then "CHALLENGE REVEALED". And the density of these copypasted challenges is so high, the world has no space to breathe. You can come across an archery challenge, a sliding block puzzle and a "legendary" enemy all right next to each other. It feels like a collectathon platformer, rather than a game that's supposed to immerse you in its open world. There are no survival sim elements like in BOTW. No weather system. No water/fire physics either. No hunting/fishing/cooking.
Well alright, so the world is a mess and the exploration is non-existent, let's talk puzzles next, because this is ultimately a puzzle platformer (I'd like to stress that this is NOT an action RPG, it has some elements but the combat is rather rare). In BOTW you had a bunch of cool physics based abilities, such as telekinesis, time stop (with stored momentum), creating ice blocks on water surfaces and just ragdolling things with bombs. The puzzles were like more modern versions of the ones in Half-Life 2 and Portal games, numerous but always short and they would make you feel smart despite the often obvious solutions. In Fenyx Rising the puzzles are more like in really old games like the Soul Reaver series, you just push/pull boxes and spheres 90% of the time. There is no telekinesis, you have to carry/push the objects very slowly. For this reason, the puzzle rooms are arduous and take a while to clear, as you're often pushing a big sphere through an obstacle course and if you mess up you have to redo the whole thing. The only clever ability is guided arrows (think the Redeemer from Unreal Tournament), basically you loose an arrow and control it in first person, to light torches or hit targets. There is virtually no clever physics stuff, just putting things on pressure plates. The puzzle design in antiquated and very tedious.
The story and art style are more subjective, but I wasn't really a fan of them. The story is very quippy, I don't mind humor in video games, but when 90% of the script is banter it gets really tiresome. Granted, there are some rather obscure references to Greek mythology now and then, but characters also constantly break the 4th wall and/or talk about modern technology or social norms, so you really can't take it seriously. The only characters in the cast are the two narrators (Zeus and Prometheus), the tutorial/hub guy (Hermes), the big bad (Typhon), the MC's brother, and the 4 gods you're saving (Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Athena and Ares). There is no one else in this world. The art style is somewhat similar to the first Fable game. Characters have big heads, hands and feet, monkey posture, while the armor design is more akin to the 2000's MMORPG's and goes full clown world with garish colors, huge pauldrons and spikes, neon glowing bits, and worse yet particles (your armor will be on fire or have leaves etc circling around it). All enemies are color coded to red/blue/purple (depending on their power level) so they all blend together into soldiers, harpies, boars/bears and giants.
So is this just a massively dumbed down BOTW with a focus on the ultra casual market? Pretty much. Why did I even buy it? I love BOTW and heard this was one of the less soulless Ubisoft games. Ultimately, I had some fun with this, as a mindless time waster, but the game gets stale and repetitive rather quickly. At least it's dirt cheap on sale.
