Reviewing the DLC New God for Immortals Fenyx Rising.
Immortals Fenyx Rising was a charming little Breath of the Wild clone that graced our hearts and warmed our beds last December. I gave the game mostly positive remarks with a few demerits for shoddy work on the grabbing system. I would have been much more excited for the launch of the New God DLC were it not for how bitter I’ve been feeling toward Ubisoft lately. Something about the company’s complete dearth of quality assurance breaking game after game with each update just rubs me the wrong way.
Specifically Ubisoft in the last couple of weeks had managed to break something major in The Division 2, Breakpoint, and even Immortals Fenyx Rising. The Blood of Zeus event wasn’t even over before Ubisoft stopped pretending to care about fixing it not working for a large portion of players.
New God takes place after the ending of Immortals Fenyx Rising and assumes that you know how the game ends. I won’t be spoiling it in this review. The crux of the story is that Fenyx has to overcome a new set of trials and that’s pretty much it. It’s hard not to look at the content in the DLC and ask “is this it?” If there’s one thing I can say about New God compared to the rest of the game it’s that you can definitely taste the budget constraints.
First off let’s talk about the DLC itself. New God is a wholly separate package from the base game. You don’t load up your save and jump into a new section of the world. Rather you click on a link on the main page and it takes you to a new section. You start a new game and it loads you into the DLC. You can’t bring over anything with you, and it looks like most cosmetics won’t even transfer over. It’s a real kick in the pants after spending dozens of hours unlocking gear and items with Fenyx only to have them stripped away in the epilogue.
There is no reasonable answer to why the DLC needs to exist in a world of its own, or for that matter why Fenyx can’t take any gear into this new expansion. And the conversation goes both ways as you come upon powerful gear in the New God DLC that can’t be taken back into the main game with you. It makes the whole endeavor feel like a massive waste of time from the outset.
Puzzles in New God can be effectively summed up as advanced mode compared to the standard game. And there are a lot of puzzles. In fact there’s almost nothing but puzzles. There are four areas of the new map each dotted with trials similar to those you faced in the normal game. That’s it, really. There isn’t even much combat to speak of, a welcome sight since your potions are also stripped away from you so you can’t heal.
But you’ll need to know all of those tricks you learned in the main game in order to get through these puzzles. You also can’t cheese it since Ubisoft knows exactly what you have available to you and has planned each puzzle accordingly. The puzzles are a mishmash of easy and deeply frustrating as some require you to make pinpoint precise movements otherwise lose a lot of progress in the puzzle.
The puzzles themselves are well crafted and the star of the show. On the backdrop of haphazardly tossed together floating platforms they add to the overall feeling of those budget constraints I mentioned earlier. New God is the filler season of a TV show while they wait for the animators to catch up on the next big season. It feels like the scraps of the main game and nothing says it quite like the lack of regular dialogue with the main characters.
New God took me about twelve hours to complete 100%, that is completing all of the trials and finding every single collectible. The season pass costs $40 and contains this plus two other narrative DLCs. The next two don’t feature a playable Fenyx at all but sound a lot more interesting than New God. The second DLC story features Chinese mythology while the third centers around Greek gods.
If you really loved the puzzles in Immortals Fenyx Rising and are thirsting for more, by all means grab New God right away. Everyone else might want to wait until this is on sale or play it as part of the Ubisoft+ subscription since you get it at no extra cost. There’s no reason to come back and play this again as there is no New Game+ mode and it doesn’t add to Fenyx’s power in the main game anyway.
A New God feels like a big waste of time. It wants to continue the story while divorcing itself from the main game. It entices players with new powerful loot but doesn’t let them use it in the most logical choice (say a New Game+). It expects players who have finely crafted their technique over dozens of hours to shed their equipment. It takes an open world game with a beautiful atmosphere and condenses it into a series of trials in a floating city with no real exploration to speak of.
Wait until it’s on sale and snag it for $5.
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