Magical shooter Immortals Of Aveum has been delayed until August

Immortals Of Aveum is a magic-fisted first-person shooter with a name that reminds me, every time, of another EA-published fantasy game, Kingdoms Of Amalur. I can't tell if that's a good thing or not. I can tell that Immortals Of Aveum has been delayed. Aveum had been aiming for a July 20th release, but has now been pushed back a month until August 22nd. "In order to realize our full vision, we are going to take a few extra weeks, making our new launch date Tuesday, August 22nd," says the announcement. "This will give us time to further polish the game, finish optimizing all platforms, and deliver a strong launch. We owe it to ourselves and to you to get this right." Aveum is being developed by Ascendant Studios, a new company founded by former Call Of Duty developer Bret Robbins. Robbins' involvement, and the game's own marketing, has led to many comparisons to Call Of Duty, but Ed had a chance to play Aveum last week and found it much more like Doom. He also found its story over-serious and its weapons lacking in heft.

And while there's certainly some punch to the magic you shoot from your wrist, I'd argue its magic doesn't really ever feel like, you know, magic. Or at least the kind of ethereal stuff that's often conjured from nothing by a gnarled stick or some twirling crystals. Spells can be mighty satisfying in something like Diablo 4, where hooning a fireball or raising a swirling pillar of frost can give you those explosions of dopamine. But magic in Immortals suffers when its rattled off like gunfire, because it rarely - if ever, actually - is loaded into a chamber and backed by the kick of a weighty slab of metal.

I still have some hope that Aveum will transcend its limitations and deliver what Ed describes as a game that has "graduated from the Channel 5 academy of magic or the bottom of the Prime Video list". We'll report back in August.