33 Immortals game review explores an ambitious MMO raid roguelike inspired by Dantes Divine Comedy
When you mash the raid mechanics from an MMO together with the bite and the respawn loop of a roguelike, you get 33 Immortals. This brave title plonks three dozen strangers into a mythological fight for survival to rise from the afterlife and toppled the Almighty. It’s an outrageously big concept that mixes cooperative play, instanced raids and a roguelike progression. Will this audacious social experiment work, or is it doomed to fail due to too many players Let’s find out.
Visually, a lot of the inspiration for the game comes from the iconic work The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. You play as a rebellious soul flung into hell in a war for freedom that sees you clawing your way out of eternal damnation through three classic layers of torment: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. These three levels have an astounding visual signature that combines some classically Catholic iconography with weird, almost alien like geometrical formations. The more upward you travel towards the heavens, the more abstraction is thrown into the enemy design and the environments; all of that coupled with a stupendous, heavily choir like soundtrack will give you a tangible feel for an all out holy rebellion.
The entire premise and game loop of the game centers around cooperation. You’re dropped into a massive map alongside a total of 32 other players, it’s then left up to you and the horde to scavenge the map, clear enemy camps and farm resources in order to gain experience at a number of shrines throughout the land. After a preparation phase is concluded, the map then collapses inward, forcing everyone in, at random locations of course, into a huge survival arena that would lead to an Ascension battle followed by an enormous, MMO raid boss fight. Interestingly, the developers made a concerted effort to omit voice chat completely in an effort to rely solely on player based mechanics to do most of the communication between the team, this takes the idea of pick up and raid games and ramps it up to the next level; forget about spending an hour in lobby’s trying to arrange times for a group as soon as you load in you’re thrown into the action.
Players take to the fight using a set of weapon archetypes, ranging from an array of melee choices like tank and sword to a choice of bow or even a ranged support staff. Each weapon also has a set of regular attack combinations: light attack, strong attack, along with some specialized unique combo abilities and mechanics that rely on a resource management system particular to that specific class type. The synergy between players during a combat is actually astounding, as hitting enemies whom already appear to have come into combat with another player will massively amplify their damage significantly. On top of that, each of the classes unique abilities also have an associated team work ability called a Co op Power, these power can be triggered by a large group of players stand on specific runes on the ground and unleashe’s an incredible amount of AoE damage, enormous damage shielding and numerous other such useful abilities to a much larger player area and the sight of 33 people annihilating something without uttering a single sound will make you incredibly satisfied.
Despite having one of the most brilliant premises seen in games, 33 Immortals manages to bog down its experience with a few unbelievably infuriating design choices which can turn a potentially fun raid session into an agonizing, frustrating waste of time.
The absolute biggest issue comes with the scaling system. The number of players required to participate in raids shrinks as you ascend further realms of the game (the game start's with 33 required players for inferno raids and dwindles down to just 11 for paradiso raids). As there are absolutely no consequences for a player choosing to disconnect and leave a raid in progress, expect to consistently start a lobby with 33 players and finish with significantly less. Raid boss' mechanics are tuned extremely for much larger raid teams, so with half a team down it will be impossible for the survivors to finish and exceedingly tedious to boot.
Moreover, the raid maps are strewn with mini dungeons, which the game calls Chambers. Players will need to loot the Chambers to get crucial pieces of gear. These chambers have their own team size caps (most rooms capping at 6, though I may be misremembering) forcing a select group of players to go do their Chamber runs whilst all remaining 24+ players stand outside waiting doing absolutely nothing while fighting infinitely respawning, boring enemies.
It is this same boring meta grind which makes playing this game as a single player in a team feel extremely disheartening. To unlock and level up weapons, you'll need to perform specific tasks known as Feats. These are, in typical games, achievement objectives.
Unfortunately, these Feats consist of ridiculously specific and grindy objectives like Do exactly 50 damage using only dash combos, and require anywhere from a few to many hours of repetition.
In a game that should fundamentally be about the synergy of teamwork, forcing every individual to engage in the same repetitive and arguably pointless weapon mastery process undermines its core premise. This repetitive grind isn't aided by the characters movement, which I found remarkably stiff in comparison to most fluid modern roguelikes. Dodging in 33 Immortals feels clumsy and your attacks tend to root you in place. Targeting also feels a bit clunky when everything is moving so quickly with over thirty players throwing abilities on screen.
Pc Version Tested.
Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from Devs
