Immortals Fenyx Rising

Fenyx, a shipwrecked and until recently entirely unremarkable soldier, discovers they're the last hope of a Greek pantheon that the titan Typhon has turned to stone across a sprawling, colorful archipelago. Immortals Fenyx Rising borrows its structure with open enthusiasm from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, climbing towers to reveal the map, solving environmental puzzle shrines, and gliding between floating islands, and reviewers who actually get to spend time with it are frequently delighted by how well that borrowed structure fits a distinctly different mythological setting. The trouble, for a large share of this review sample, starts well before any of that.

A creative, well-loved adventure once it's actually running

Reviewers who focus specifically on the game itself are consistently warm, often surprised at how much they enjoyed a Ubisoft open-world release. Multiple reviewers explicitly use the "Zelda and Assassin's Creed had a baby" comparison as high praise, crediting the exploration and puzzle design with genuine creativity rather than a shallow reskin of a more famous game. The writing and humor draw their own sustained, specific praise, with the narrator's banter about the Greek gods singled out repeatedly as a highlight that keeps even repetitive open-world busywork entertaining. Combat and traversal earn credit for feeling more varied and satisfying than reviewers expected from the studio's recent output, and several reviewers explicitly rank it among Ubisoft's best releases of the past decade specifically because of that creative cohesion. The colorful, family-friendly tone and lack of graphic violence also draw specific praise, with more than one reviewer describing playing through it happily alongside a young child, one specifically noting the writing stays clean enough for a five-year-old to follow along with while the combat and puzzle design remain genuinely engaging for the adult playing alongside them. Several reviewers also single out the game's take on Greek mythology itself as a highlight distinct from the gameplay, describing the gods as written with real comic personality rather than as generic quest-giver archetypes borrowed wholesale from mythology reference books.

A launcher problem that dominates the review sample almost entirely

What keeps this review from scoring meaningfully higher has little to do with any of that. An overwhelming, detailed and independently corroborated share of the negative review sample concerns the mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher rather than the game itself. Reviewers report account-ownership authentication failures that prevent an already-purchased game from launching at all, cloud-save and offline-play failures including one detailed account of losing hours of manually saved progress when the launcher failed to recognize the save file, and persistent login and connectivity friction that several reviewers describe in genuinely furious terms. This isn't a scattering of isolated technical complaints; it's close to the dominant theme of the entire negative review sample, repeated independently by dozens of reviewers in strikingly similar language regardless of how they otherwise feel about the game underneath it.

A completionist frustration layered on top

A smaller but specific complaint concerns achievement tracking: reviewers report the game relies on Ubisoft Connect's own separate achievement system rather than Steam's native one, a frustration for completionists who specifically value Steam-integrated tracking and community features. Separately, multiple reviewers report awkward or incomplete controller support on PC, including on-screen button prompts that fail to switch to match whichever controller is actually plugged in, a rough edge for a game reviewers otherwise describe as clearly designed with a controller in mind. A handful of reviewers separately report the game's precision platforming sections, built around a character with noticeably slippery movement on narrow ledges, cause more frustration than the puzzle-solving they're meant to accompany, though this is a comparatively minor complaint set against the launcher problems dominating the rest of the sample.

A game reviewers say deserved more attention than it got

Beyond the technical complaints, a specific historical note recurs across the sample: Immortals Fenyx Rising launched the same season as Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and a meaningful number of reviewers argue directly that Ubisoft's marketing priorities buried a more creative, more distinctive game underneath its own bigger-budget franchise release. That context doesn't excuse the launcher problems, but it helps explain why reviewers who did discover the game seem particularly invested in recommending it on its own merits, treating it as a genuine underdog within Ubisoft's own catalog rather than simply another open-world release.

What the achievement data suggests about early drop-off

Global achievement data adds a concrete data point consistent with the launcher-frustration theme. Even the single easiest achievement clears only around 28% of players who've unlocked anything at all, a soft start that lines up with reviewers' accounts of players bouncing off the game early due to authentication and connectivity problems rather than losing interest in the content itself once they're actually able to play it.

Verdict

Immortals Fenyx Rising is, on its own creative merits, a genuinely well-regarded entry in Ubisoft's catalog, with reviewers consistently praising its Breath of the Wild-inspired exploration, its writing, and its colorful, family-friendly tone as real standouts against the studio's more formulaic recent output. It sits at a middling score here for reasons that have almost nothing to do with any of that: an overwhelming, detailed and remarkably consistent share of the review sample reports the mandatory Ubisoft Connect launcher actively prevents people from playing a game they've already paid for, through authentication failures, broken cloud saves, and unreliable offline play. Worth playing for the adventure itself, but confirm the current state of Ubisoft Connect's reliability before buying, since for a real share of this review sample, the launcher rather than the game is what actually determines whether the purchase was worth it.