Conclusion

"Immortals of Aveum" is a first-person shooter game where traditional guns are replaced with spellcasting abilities of different colors. Players use red for close combat, green for rapid fire, and blue for distant shots; there's around a dozen spells in total. The combat, while innovative and fluid, does become a bit repetitive as the game progresses. The story follows Jak in a war over magic control, exploring environmental themes, and it's pretty decent, but that's probably not enough to lure players away from Baldur's Gate 3 or their Starfield pre-order.

In terms of graphics the game looks pretty decent, even though it has a kind of boring look that comes across a little bit dated. No doubt, the environments are beautifully crafted, which is an achievement by the map designers, not the graphics programmers. While the amount of detail on objects is quite ok, it's still lower than expected. Polygon counts on NPCs and enemies are much lower than expected, for an Unreal Engine 5 game in 2023. I'm also missing A LOT of detail in textures, no idea why they aren't shipping better textures. Other parts of the game do look really good, especially when it comes to vegetation-rich environments. There is no support for ray tracing, but Unreal Engine 5's Lumen and Nanite are used for rendering.

Not unexpected for an Unreal Engine 5 game, there's a little bit of pop-in as you travel across the world, and I also noticed a tiny amount of shader stuttering from time to time. There is a "compiling shaders" screen at the start, but it completes quickly and is generally a non-issue. What I didn't like at all were the mouse controls, aiming feels extremely inaccurate, but you get used to it. The default FOV was way too narrow for me too, playing at the maximum of 90 was "ok," but I would have loved to have a little bit more headroom here.

Hardware requirements of the game are insane. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with highest settings you need a RTX 3080, RX 6800 XT or faster. Yup.. lol.. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you've gotta bring the big guns—only the RX 7900 XT, 7900 XTX, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 can achieve 60 FPS at that resolution. 4K60? No way, RTX 4090 gets 44 FPS, RX 7900 XTX is close-behind, with 41 FPS. Given the graphics you're getting this performance is terrible. Not sure what's wrong with game developers this year, but there's no way the game should run this badly on decent hardware. While you're able to dial down the settings, they actually make very little difference visually, and the performance gains are rather small, too. At least there's support for DLSS and FSR upscaling, and you can even enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation. The problem is that apparently nobody ever tested DLSS 3 in the game, because it comes with an unbelievable amount of artifacts, ghosting and issues—completely unusable. On top of that you can only enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation when DLSS 2 Upscaling is enabled (which is not an actual technical requirement). There's no support for DLAA either, but that's the least of your problems I'd say.

VRAM requirements are fairly high at lower resolutions—around 7 GB. Powerful graphics cards these days have plenty of VRAM, 16 GB or more, so 4K hitting 8.4 GB is a total non-issue. Maybe give us better textures if more VRAM is available? Lowering details doesn't do that much for VRAM, even at 1600x900 with lowest settings the allocations hit 6 GB, which seems a bit high for "lowest." While the game is pretty decent, performance aside, it's launching at a terrible time—there's plenty of better games around that people are playing or will play. What I do like is that the Steam version runs fine without EA launcher installed, and it works perfectly in offline mode, too.