Fenyx Rising, Stadia Falling

There are so many gaming releases coming this November and December, it’s just unreal. With the recently delayed (again) Cyberpunk 2077 to December and a possible December release for WoW: Shadowlands, it’s becoming an extremely crowded month with Immortals Fenyx Rising launching that same time as well. Regardless, Ubisoft has chosen to release a demo for the multiplatform game exclusively on Stadia. Love it or hate it, the platform is here for now and several developers and publishers are betting their futures on the stream platform.

No matter your thoughts on Stadia or streaming games as a whole, the demo for Immortals Fenyx Rising is absolutely top notch. With definite nods to Breath of the Wild including climbing, art style, etc, Fenyx still manages to be a breath of fresh air in a market crowded with copycats. The mythology components in the demo are near perfectly balanced between awesome spectacle and very tongue in cheek sarcasm and humor with Zeus being quite the comedian in the opening scenes.

Whether battling with baddies or soaring the skies to explore the gorgeous environments, the game is smooth and just glorious to play so far. I absolutely loved exploring and finding new loot and gear, trying new combos and just taking in all the sights and sounds. Now, while the demo is fantastic, dealing with Stadia is where I had a few headaches. First off, no matter what is said, and even with Pro 4K settings, this game is clearly 1080p upscaled regardless of PC, laptop, etc device the game is played on. Also, even with a 1 gbps fiber link, there were a few pauses in action and several scenes of video compression but only on the 3D portion while 2D images and text were flawless.

While Stadia is not a deal breaker (you can try the demo for free now), I definitely would be putting my hard earned gaming dollars into that version. Luckily the game is coming December 3rd for Xbox One, PS4/PS5, Switch and PC.