There is such a thing as too much of a game, obfuscating the greater aspects by cluttering it with unnecessary or bloated features. A great example of that would be Immortals Fenyx Rising, Ubisoft’s response to Breath of the Wild with a twist. I’d argue that Fenyx Rising is a fantastic puzzle platformer that gives its inspiration a run for its money, if not outright outshining it in the puzzle aspect. However, Ubisoft’s key open-world designs put the game in a swampy situation where you have to slog through uninspired world traversal and repetitive combat to get a glimpse of the fun.

Like Breath of the Wild, Fenyx Rising has a scattering of temples where you will be tested on your puzzle, platforming, or combat skills to gain upgrades for the player’s stats. Pretty standard affair. The game really shines in its open-world constellation puzzles. The best showcase of one of these was in Aphrodite’s Temple. You enter a grand space with an assortment of small contraptions. As you wander around, you find a display that shows you the placement and number of orbs you need to create a constellation and a grid where the orbs will go. The orbs are scattered throughout the temple; you most likely noticed some of them as you made your way through it or even unlocked some by just fiddling with the nearby puzzles. They test out different aspects of your character’s abilities, and once brought together create a constellation and unlock lore dedicated to Aphrodite. It’s a perfect self-contained area that fosters curiosity and encourages exploration by giving the player one large goal connected by a list of smaller ones without the need for a checklist or pointing the player directly to the task (although there is an option to do that by lowering the difficulty of the puzzles if the player needs it). It really engages the player by showing a goal and making them find the solutions to it.

The game knows that the puzzles are its major strength, as each of the four gods who you rescue throughout your adventure ends with a massive puzzle world, each containing its own mechanic that’s exclusive to the boss puzzle area. However, the journey to unlocking these puzzles can be a massive slog. At first, the combat was fairly fun. You get to challenge yourself against the enemies as you are under-leveled and everything is a threat. However, as the game continues, the enemies stay the same mechanically but only scale in their stats, so as the game progresses, the fighting stays static if not annoyingly grindy. Towards the end of the game, I ended up lowering the difficulty of the combat because fighting the same enemy felt like I was wasting time. You don’t really receive any rewards from fighting and only lose resources in the process, so it’s completely disincentivized unless it’s necessary to access a puzzle area.

This frustration is compounded by the open world. In usual Ubisoft fashion, the map is extremely large and filled with filler content that pads the run time. It’s not necessary to do any of it, but there is an itch in the gamer brain that the map should be cleared of these icons, and you start to toil away on the forgettable combat scenario number #154. This icon clearing also inhibits one of the main aspects of the game Fenyx Rising is mimicking: looking into the distance and seeing something cool you want to explore. Because the game is bogged down by the icon clearing, the player’s journey is a straight line from point A to B rather than bumbling around discovering neat areas. The core traveler’s loop is also in no way iterated upon. In Breath of the Wild, some areas would have rain, cold, heat, lightning striking, obstacles that prevented the player from doing the basic A to B. However, pretty much everything is static in Fenyx Rising regardless of zone and time, so you will climb everything in the same manner from the start of the game until the end of it.

Now don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t absolutely gut these systems, as downtime between solving puzzles is good. Some time for the brain to rest is necessary to avoid burning out from thinking. However, it’s just too much. I almost didn’t finish the game because I was so worn out from the experience. Bigger and longer doesn’t mean the game is better or that there’s a worthwhile experience to partake in; it just means there is more, which itself is meaningless. This game deserved more linear segments combined with medium-sized open areas, something akin to the new God of War to truly shine.

Immortals Fenyx Rising could have been a new jewel in Ubisoft’s crown. It has the strong puzzle design that is engaging and well thought out, a competent combat system that can provide a good reprieve from the puzzles for the time being, and the evergreen story theme of visiting different gods and cultures. If only it had tightened its belt and lost some of Ubisoft’s open-world tendencies, it could have been a long-running franchise. Unfortunately, as of now, the next installment of the series has been canceled, and the team behind it has been shuffled among other teams at Ubisoft. Hopefully, the talented people behind the project get to showcase their skills on something great soon.