There’s plenty of room to admire the scenery, or to just gallop across a field, or to appreciate the concept of distance for how landmarks are placed strategically so you always know where you are. The company designs games in mortal terror of negative space (e.g. But Fenyx is a deliberately compressed game. It’s got Odyssey’s Greek mythology and Breath’s easygoing balance of combat, puzzles, and exploration. An easy description of Fenyx is Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey meets Breath of the Wild, and that’s not wrong. This is also an important contrast to Breath of the Wild. But how long does it take to ride from the Hall of the Gods to the Palace of Aphrodite in Fenyx? Exactly as long as it should. How long does it take to ride from Athens to Sparta in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey? Both too long and not long enough. It’s a compact playground that doesn’t have to mimic someone’s expectation of the real world. Fenyx is more tightly engineered for pacing and gameplay density. In terms of geography and time spent playing, it was massive. It is Ubisoft putting into practice what they’ve learned over the years, and doing it with style. Fenyx lays its card on the table early on because it wants to delight you.Īssassin’s Creed: Odyssey is easily the best Assassin’s Creed game. Hades plays it close to the vest because it wants to surprise you. The cool features are front-loaded for you to play with at your convenience. Fenyx is driven by exploring a large island, but you’re going to get a solid sense of what it’s doing very quickly. It’s a matter of finding out the next design feature. The sense of exploration is very real in Hades, but it’s not a matter of finding out what’s in the next room. If there’s one criticism I can level at Hades, it’s that it takes a while to reveal itself. But for a couple of reasons, it threads the needle between them and, in my opinion, is better than each of them. In fact, as a lesson in confident and effective game design, it’s right up there with two other Greek odysseys: Hades and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. The whole thing is brimming with sincerity. Its aesthetic is a familiar setting cannily executed with sparkling wit. Its blueprint is drawn from proven open-world gameplay principles, adroitly balanced at the intersection of fighting, solving, and exploring.
It doesn’t have any problematic historical angle like the Viking plunder of England. It doesn’t have any ambitious overarching concept like opening the entire population of London to your control. But Fenyx feels like it was built from the ground up on good ideas. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and especially Watch Dogs: Legion felt like they’d been hijacked by bad ideas at the top level. It’s a remarkable contrast to Ubisoft’s other recent open-world games because it gets so much right where they got so much wrong. Every time I played, I ended up smiling at its insight, confidence, charm, and humor. But Immortals Fenyx Rising is one of those rare games that never let me down.
There was going to be some misstep or oversight or shortcut, something that wasn’t fully developed or that should have been cut. At some point, it was going to do something to disappoint me.
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