Roll To Win.

Dicefolk is a fun turn-based roguelike with a decent variety of environments and characters to stay entertaining, but the content itself becomes repetitive. Although excitement is added through boss encounters and the gamble of random rolls, the repetition holds Dicefolk back from excelling.

Pros

• +Huge variety of quirky creatures to tame
• +Boss battles keep combat exciting
• +Expansive map with different biomes to explore

Cons

• -Loop becomes a bit repetitive
• -I’m always incredibly unlucky

Dicefolk, a roguelike from Leap Game Studios, puts you into the shoes of a determined summoner, responsible for an army of chimera. These are the creatures that litter the entire map and that you aim to recruit into your own party to then train and take into battle. Similarly to Pokémon, these beasts adopt a huge variety of appearances, and anything from a potted plant to a huge dragon could spring to life. You never know what type of chimera is waiting around the corner, but it’s always your job to wrangle them.

However, rather than sending your chimera into battle like Pokémon, the game takes a unique approach to every instance of combat. Although you are somewhat in control, your entire turn is based on a dice roll. So, you always have to hope and pray that lady luck is on your side and you have a solid enough roll of your three dice to take down whatever beasties you come up against.

A Roll of the Dice

Dicefolk’s combat is incredibly fluid. You take control of your team of three chimeras you recruit along your journey. At the start, you begin with three incredibly weak creatures that offer little to no power, but the further you travel around the map, the stronger the chimera you can recruit at statues positioned around the map for your next bought of combat. Each encounter needs to be carefully planned out to ensure your success through tactical rotations of party members, and well-timed attacks. However, you don’t have the same abilities – such as a ranged attack, or the ability to rotate – each turn. Instead, every round is controlled by the roll of three dice.

I’m not the luckiest person when it comes to anything, really, and this losing streak continued during my experience with Dicefolk. More often than not, my rolls gave me ranged attacks that caused less damage and team rotations rather than the option to strengthen my team by bulking up before attacking. Of course, this isn’t the game’s fault as these rolls are entirely random, but I couldn’t help but feel like it became a bit of a personal attack after a while.

BEST BIT: Dicefolk

The unknown factor of not knowing what you’re about to encounter is easily the best part of Dicefolk. I was always excited to see what creatures would crop up in the next combat encounter, heightening a sense of anticipation.

However, this infrequent success makes combat feel tense and also encourages you to be careful and deliberate rather than rushing in with all guns blazing. When you start in Dicefolk, it’s incredibly easy to be hasty when attacking your enemies, and you can be overly reliant on a few attacks from only one of your chimeras rather than utilizing your whole team. But, as you progress through the map and enter different biomes that are littered with increasingly intimidating creatures, taking your time with encounters, thinking about your moves, and which members of your party are worth bringing to battle becomes incredibly important.

Across the map, you’ll encounter a huge range of critters that you’ll have to face which keeps combat exciting and fresh. This is a major attraction of Dicefolk as you never know what you’ll find, heightening the game’s concept of everything being a gamble. The character design makes up a huge part of the game’s charm, too, and helps make the first experience fighting many of the beasties more enchanting. One moment you’ll be fighting a small, seaweed-clad dog called Algel, but then you’ll have an encounter with a towering koala-esque beast rather than fighting the same thing over and over again.

However, adding another layer to the combat, your ability to control chimeras isn’t limited to your own team. You also take control of the enemy side, allowing you to decide and plan out what attacks impact your team. This occasionally enables you to give yourself the upper hand, sacrificing your weaker chimera against enemies with stronger attacks and giving yourself an opening to hit back twice as hard in your next turn. Although this isn’t always the case, it does feel rewarding when you do factor enemy moves in and manage to tactically plan four turns in advance, finally pulling off a master heist and taking the win.

Jack of all Trades

It’s not all random dice rolls and crossing fingers in combat though, and there’s a lot of work that goes into Dicefolk outside of just attacks. Across the map, you’ll find shops to buy equipment and armor that provide different buffs to your party of chimera, as well as statues that you can visit to recruit new chimera to join your adventure. Each creature brings unique abilities and skills to the table, so it pays to familiarize yourself with the capabilities of your companions to ensure you’re taking advantage of any moves that could help you take down enemies.

Rewards from particularly challenging battles provide an incentive to continue pushing through combat, since, much like the various species you’ll recruit along the way, you never know what reward could be waiting for you. Overall, it’s a pretty familiar loop of  ‘battle a beast, get a reward, move on to the next bit’, but the surprise of not really knowing what’s to come is the thing that’ll keep drawing you through Dicefolk.

Prepare For The Worst

The numerous bosses are where your army will really be tested. Like any other battle, you’ll still take control of enemy attacks as you would your own, but these boss fights tend to offer a bigger challenge than your standard enemy encounter since each boss occupies one of the dice rolls with a special die.

Although this roll does have a similar formula to other enemies, with the possibility to offer an attack, defense, or random rotation, generally the attacks are frenzied and rotations tend to prioritize bringing the boss chimera to the front of the party. If there’s time to plan your next move carefully, it would be during these significantly harder battles especially since the boss dice roll will offer harder attacks than the others and thus cause more damage to your party.

If you’ve been playing it safe, breezing through chimera encounters, then these boss battles will feel like a significant jump up in difficulty.  These encounters are where planning your next move and utilizing whatever armor or equipment you’ve picked up along the way is at its most important. If you fail and three of your chimera faint then you’ll have to start building your army from scratch once again from the ground up.

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES: Dicefolk

Unfortunately, Dicefolk offers no dedicated accessibility options, which is disappointing. Considering how much on-screen text there is, being unable to adjust the size of this text may impact some player’s experience.

Generally, Dicefolk is simple in its premise, yet still provides an entertaining experience that is bound to appeal to anyone who loves luck-based combat encounters and quirky characters. Rewards and charming characters offer you the drive to keep you plowing through each environment and map, and combat is just exciting enough with the reliance on luck to stay fun.

As a result, there’s always something that’ll have you excited to keep exploring and to see what comes next, or how you can approach battles slightly differently for a more positive outcome. All in, this makes for a satisfying, albeit occasionally repetitive, experience.

The post Dicefolk Review – Luck Be a Lady Tonight appeared first on Review Products.

Baldur’s Gate III was published to enthusiastic acclaim about two weeks before Immortals of Aveum, EA’s new first-person spell-shooter action game. With its richly rewarding quests, solid gaming mechanisms, and evocative characters and narratives, the Dungeons & Dragons-based RPG from Larian Studios became a worldwide sensation, attracting over 800,000 continuous players on Steam. The Forgotten Realms provides the setting for hundreds of hours of fascinating gameplay in Baldur’s Gate III, a game that is a strong contender for Game of the Year.

A massive space RPG from Bethesda called Starfield debuted two weeks after Immortals with the promise of a thousand planets. Starfield, the studio’s first new intellectual property in 25 years, lets you live out your space fantasies with unlimited exploration, precise gunplay, and starship construction.

According to studio director Todd Howard, it’s like Skyrim in space: fly anywhere, do anything. Like Baldur’s Gate, Starfield—possibly the biggest Xbox exclusive in a decade—requires hundreds of hours to appreciate its joys fully. It promises to take readers on an enthralling voyage through the wonders of space and time, examining ideas of existence and being and the profundity of human endeavor—the pursuit of knowledge.

Immortals of Aveum, a game with modest goals that let you discharge colored magic spells from your fingers in a pew-pew fashion, sits between these two enormous, genre-defining titles. That’s it. Immortals do not aim to completely immerse you in its world or provide complex gameplay mechanisms, but that is okay.

This is because it allows for fun, which is one thing that video games should always offer. The two games that bookend Immortals’ release are far more ambitious and expansive than Immortals. You don’t have to put in a lot of time; you don’t even have to commit.

Different from its two competitors, it definitely won’t be in the running for Game of the Year. However, the basic plot of Immortals, its sincere and downright ridiculous parody of contemporary superhero movies, and its condensed, 25-hour campaign provide precisely what the game promises – nothing more, nothing less.

Call of Duty meets Dr. Strange

Immortals of Aveum is a first-person shooter without the use of firearms. It is the debut title from Ascendant Studios and is distributed by EA Originals. You fire color-coded magic spells here, like what you might anticipate if Dr. Strange and Call of Duty met.

The action visually resembles Ghostwire Tokyo from 2022, although it unfolds differently. This year, magic has been making a comeback (with different degrees of success) thanks to Forspoken and Hogwarts Legacy, and Immortals also prominently utilizes the arcane. The game’s primarily linear single-player campaign features narrow levels with some branching paths for exploration.

The gameplay elements that pace out the spell-shooting action are of a modest but robust variety. Each level includes straightforward yet fun platforming features and riddles that slow down the movement.

There is a passable plot that unfolds much like a subpar DC film. The game’s arena-style shooting segments, where you use a variety of magic spells and rush and jump like a bunny on caffeine, are undoubtedly its best features.

Jak, a simple street thief in Seren’s shantytown, is how you will travel through the Aveuman regions. Unbeknownst to him, he possesses a potent and uncommon magic in his veins. As Jak endures a personal tragedy and enlists as a soldier in the Everwar, a 2,000-year conflict spanning Aveum’s five kingdoms, you follow his journey.

We watch his journey unfold as he establishes himself as a warrior on the front lines and rises to the rank of Immortal, a group of elite magicians who direct the war effort and guard Lucium, one of Aveum’s five kingdoms. In all honesty, it can be challenging to keep up with the information deluge at first.

To establish the world of Aveum, the blazing struggle, the parties participating, their motivations, and the ancient artifacts and secrets that threaten to change the Everwar’s course and, in turn, the fate of the lands, the game throws a basketful of half-cooked and well-known magical history at you.

Aveum’s universe is powered by magic

I wouldn’t blame you if you felt like you were swimming in jargon. It’s a lot to take in: the Shrouded Realm, the Wound, the Pentacade, Laylines, Fonts, Binding Stones, and Shrineforges. Thankfully, you may disregard the deep end and navigate the understandable information’s shallow waters by keeping things straightforward.

You are a battlemage engaged in an unending conflict where the distinction between good and evil is frequently hazy. It follows a well-known hero’s journey in line with most successful superhero movies, where humor breaks up the action and suspense at every turn. There isn’t much novel about the story, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. You are caught off guard by a few of the road’s curves and twists.

In the Everwar, Jak is joined by a colorful assortment of Immortal companions. Jak’s mentor and the person who took him in after his life in Seren broke apart was Kirkan, the commander of the Immortals.

She is unyielding and furious, plays her cards close to her chest, and frequently gives Jak’s inquiries regarding the Everwar painfully evasive responses. Jak’s field commander, Zendara, is focused on the next task and has little time for friendly banter.

On the other hand, Devyn is chatty and outgoing, acting as a welcoming presence among the menacing Immortals. Additionally, he brings laughs, throwing jokes whenever the opportunity arises with the assurance of a clown, even if some fall flat.

In the Everwar, the Immortals command Lucium’s army against Sandrakk’s soldiers, a despot who seeks to rule over the wellspring of all magic in Aveum. The characters in the game are the usual suspects you’d expect to show up in a phase five MCU film, but they manage to have an excellent natural chemistry together. This results from consistently strong voice acting, even in weak material.

Jak’s mentor, Kirkan, is in charge of the Immortals

As I’ve already noted, Immortals frequently resembles a genre-worn superhero movie, hitting well-worn narrative beats and action set pieces. The writing in the game often employs humor as a crutch, much like the films it aims to mimic, yet it never turns the line into being overly earnest. The volume and abruptness of jokes frequently lower the stakes and reduce narrative suspense. Still, they occasionally mirror the situation’s overall silliness, never being afraid to embrace the absurd.

New characters are continually presented; you can always count on them to be ominous and terrifying. But when you meet them, they come across as quick-witted idiots a la Joss Whedon, and you can’t help but chuckle.

For instance, to find the volcanic lair of the man you’re looking for, you must first infiltrate a horrific underworld and then go via a trail that is burning with lava and ash while fending off swarms of adversaries. When you first meet him, you expect him to be fierce, but instead, he seems mildly angry that you broke into his bachelor pad, corrects you when you call his parlor a porch and then offers you coffee.

Whistles and magic

Immortals of Aveum makes a lot of effort to be a movie, but its best parts are the video game-like elements. Bret Robbins, a seasoned executive who oversaw the development of the original Dead Space and multiple Call of Duty missions, is the head of Ascendant Studios.

Immortals, who, if you exclude the magic, is essentially a first-person shooter, benefit from his experience. The ancient power of the blue, green, and red colors sustains Aveum’s universe. Each branch of magic that a Magni can use, but Jak is a Triarch Magni who possesses a rare mastery over all three colors of magic.

Sigils, which in the game serve as magical versions of guns, are used to control each branch of magic. Red magic has the short-range, heavy damage, and more minor clip characteristics of shotguns. Blue magic can be used in place of a sniper rifle or other precision weapon for long-range warfare.

Fully automatic rifles or submachine guns with large clip sizes, ideal for taking on foes at medium range, are represented by green magic. However, the rapid-firing green Sigils have more recoil and spray, which affects your accuracy. When you munch through the clip, each Sigil has a predetermined reload time that can be shortened later through skill upgrades.

In the equip menu, sigils can be changed

Most adversaries in Aveum are also color-coded, necessitating the use of the proper magic kind to reduce their health bars. Juggling the various Sigils and switching between your magic colors (with a quick press of the triangle button on PlayStation’s Dualsense controller) become necessary and, thankfully, stay enjoyable as each fight throws a motley horde of enemies at you.

Each magic color is accompanied by a Totem that casts a control spell that aids you in navigating the environment, controlling adversaries during combat, and solving puzzles in addition to these attack-focused striking spells connected to your Sigils. Your left hand is connected to Totems, and your right hand has Sigils.

The Lash spell, essentially a magical whip that draws distant adversaries closer to you in combat and enables you to grip on to anchor points in the environment during exploration, is channeled by Blue Totems, or Chains. Limpets, fluid blobs that slow down moving targets, whether an adversary or an object, are found in Green Totems or Vials. Red Totems, also known as Lenses, project fiery scarlet disrupt spell beams that interrupt opposing magic strikes and leave the enemy stunned.

Your spellbook also contains augments, such as a shield to shelter you from approaching fire and the powers to blink and hover, which help dodge opponent assaults and move about platforms.

The mix of attack, control, and augment spells in Immortals is excellent; they all work well with one another and never overwhelm the player or become cumbersome. When your Dominion meter is complete, you can also perform an ultimate attack that releases a potent beam of magic that combines all three magic colors and delivers terrible damage.

Combat between immortals can be hallucinogenic and chaotic

Immortals’ fighting is limited to arena-style fights that are split amid twisting exploratory passages. There is a good variety of threats here, but eventually, you will primarily be shooting at recognizable adversaries. In addition, each chapter has brand-new boss fights that, while essentially simple, offer a refreshing change from the game’s normal gameplay.

While spell shooting functions like firing with guns in any other shooter, the experience isn’t quite the same. It falls short of feeling as tight and sophisticated as the gunplay in Call of Duty and needs more impact and feedback on guns. Additionally, the combat never becomes particularly difficult, and each encounter area has a plentiful supply of healing and mana crystals that refill your HP and magic bars. Immortals are easy on Normal, but I’d suggest the Hard mode if you want to work for your rewards.

Immortals of Aveum, thankfully, encourages a decent amount of exploring and rewards intrepid players with equipment and currency. It functions similarly to side trips in God of War or Jedi: Fallen Order, which has branching side pathways frequently imprisoned in mostly linear hub areas. The routes widen as you learn new skills and spells, opening up new worlds to discover, items to uncover, and foes to face.

Although these hub worlds are far smaller than God of War’s, you may always return to an area you’ve already visited and discover something new. Each level also has Shroudfanes, optional tasks that involve boss fights, and separate platforming sections, both of which can be challenging but offer high-value rewards.

There is a skill tree for each of the three branches of magic and the standard equipment and upgrading system. These are straightforward and functional rather than delving deeply, as in an RPG, which works in Immortals’ favor.

Performances and Visuals

One of the first significant games created with Unreal Engine 5’s Nanite geometry and ray-traced Lumen lighting is Immortals of Aveum, and it shows. Immortals can appear gorgeous under the proper lighting. This applies to both characters and settings. Character faces are expressive, expressing subtle variations in mood and expression.

The game’s campaign transports you across various outdoor areas and shifting landscapes. The game’s golden lighting makes open plains, icy cliffs, thick foliage, and desert places attractive. However, the art of Immortals feels copied and needs a distinct, new identity.

The PS5’s performance is also negatively impacted by the glossy graphics. There isn’t a way to alter the graphic settings or switch between performance and quality modes. On the other hand, Immortals aims for a 4K output at 60 frames per second.

Although it mostly hits its framerate goals, performance suffers in regions with bustling traffic and intense combat. You can observe that texture quality and image resolution were sacrificed on the altar of framerate because the visual quality is still erratic. Future updates may address some of the problems.

At the time of this writing, a third update is available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and it promises to enhance upscaling for improved image fidelity on consoles and several other improvements.

Verdict

Nowadays, good single-player shooter campaigns take a lot of work to come by, especially with games like Call of Duty and Battlefield focusing more on their wildly successful multiplayer modes. Another disappearing species is the brief, charming single-player campaign free of battle passes, lootboxes, and microtransactions.

In addition, Immortals of Aveum comes out complete and in decent condition at a time when companies rush to release broken games. Despite its shortcomings, it has the right intentions at heart. It is simple to complete because of its unpolished but enjoyable spell-shooting action and surprisingly well-executed level design.

Although its summer blockbuster plot is nothing new, it manages to charm you with its sincere good looks. And although though it has a fair share of loose screws and dents, the machine’s various working cogs fit together logically to create it.

Games these days demand time and focus, almost like homework, which is why Immortals of Aveum is released at such a time. They require that you virtually put your life on hold to live a different, more fulfilling life in the enormous virtual playgrounds they provide.

This is not a complaint since I fondly recall the period when Red Dead Redemption 2 was released, and I gave up everything to live as an outlaw on the American frontier for roughly three months. In all honesty, no other medium can match video games’ transforming and teleporting potential.

However, only some games have to be a multi-course meal. They are delicious when eaten as a snack. Immortals are the bite-sized biscuit you need now, even though it won’t leave a particularly distinctive taste on your tongue. Immortals of Aveum captures the medium’s bygone simplicity and shallowness, which may be just as significant at a time when ambitious video games display the enormous depth they can give.

Pros

• fun spell-shooting battles
• A challenging single-player campaign
• Exploration and platforming done well
• likable individuals
• No bugs, no microtransactions
• striking images

Cons

• generic lousy guy and plot
• overpowering and excessive lore
• style of derivative art
• performing poorly

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