33 Immortals was provided by Xbox and Thunder Lotus for review. Thank You!
33 Immortals presents us with an intriguing concept. Gathering 33 players together in a survival-like arena, battling against enemies and becoming stronger, before taking on increasing challenges and eventually facing the final boss in order to "ascend" to the next level.
How does the concept translate into gameplay, though? While 33 Immortals may look on the surface like a typical Action RPG like Diablo or Path of Exile, I found the reality to be a little more disappointing. Likely due to the fact that the game is designed to be played in large groups of players, your individual strength is quite weak, and gaining power is one of the most exciting parts of games in this style, and 33 Immortals just didn't scratch that itch for me.
You could also compare 33 Immortals to games like Vampire Survivors, where you are facing off against endless enemies and periodically fighting bosses. But again, the appeal of these games comes from gaining exponential strength and feeling like a powerhouse, but 33 Immortals instead relies heavily on cooperating with your allies in order to succeed, which, to me, didn't give me as much of a thrill.
That said, the co-op aspect of the game worked well for me in the matches I played. When you first begin a match, you'll be thrown into a wide-open map with a large number of other players (up to 32), and people tend to split off into groups of 3-5 players as they take down weaker foes, acquire relics to increase their powers, and upgrade their stats. After a few minutes, smaller arenas will open, where small groups can enter and fight waves of enemies. There are many arenas around the map, and each must be beaten, so once you finish yours, you can help out other teams that aren't finished yet.
I must say that the weapons are also quite balanced, although I much prefer the ranged weapons like the bow and crossbow. The playerbase seems to use a fairly wide variety of weapons to good effect, meaning you can choose what playing style you want to go for without "nerfing" your character too much.
Once the arenas are finished, all surviving players team up to fight the big bad boss of the level. Sadly, this turned out to be pretty disappointing. The final bosses take time to beat, but the attacks of the bosses I encountered were easily avoidable, and I found the preceding arenas to be the more challenging part of the game. On my 2nd run, I succeeded and made it through the first level to ascend. There is a great feeling when it's you and 30 other players wailing on a boss together, but I also felt a little empty just repeating attacks over and over and then occasionally dodging when a very obvious attack was coming every few seconds.
Upon returning to the hub, you'll get the chance to hand in any "feats" you've completed, which reward you with upgrades such as leveling up and perk slots. This is 33 Immortals' progression system, and while you get a serotonin boost from handing in the feats, as I said before, you do still feel pretty weak. The main advantage I found was that each level up gives you some additional max health, which does help you tank a couple of extra hits. The perks are pretty modest in the advantages they give, but they can be upgraded to the point where they will slightly affect how you play the game.
After this, it's really rinse and repeat; there isn't too much change in the game as you progress. There are 3 different "levels" you can visit, with 33, 22, and 11 players entering them, respectively, and these levels don't vary up the game too much, with the aesthetics and core gameplay being pretty similar throughout. I definitely felt the repetition sink in after a few runs, since the maps stay the same each time. Having the environment be similar, but with procedurally generated maps, would likely have helped a lot here.
Don't get me wrong, there is fun to be had in 33 Immortals, and I think if I were playing in a party with friends that I knew (you can party with up to 4 players), I would have enjoyed my time with it more. But as a solo player, I felt rather disconnected from the other players I was fighting alongside, as there was little communication beyond trying to quickly fire off an emote mid-combat. That, coupled with feeling weak on my own and a rather slow progression, resulted in a middling, sometimes unsatisfying playing experience.
33 Immortals supports 1280x800 resolution and offers fantastic controller support, which is the recommended way to play, in my opinion.
The game doesn't offer many graphics settings, aside from the amount of VFX you want on screen. By default, this is set to the maximum, and there's no reason to change it, as 33 Immortals is bottlenecked by the Steam Deck's CPU, not its GPU.
I would recommend applying a 30 FPS frame rate cap in SteamOS when playing 33 Immortals. The game can often run in the 50s, but during intense combat with many enemies (and allies), expect the FPS to drop quite heavily, sometimes into the low 20s. Limiting the frame rate to 30 FPS provides a mostly stable experience in quieter combat scenarios, but do expect drops during the Arenas and Boss encounters when many players are together.
The 30 FPS limit also helps to improve battery life in moments when the Steam Deck could run the game faster, which is important as battles can last quite some time, and you don't want your battery dying while you are on a run.
Expect the power draw to be around 18W-21W, giving us an estimated battery life of around 2.5 Hours on a Steam Deck OLED and around 1.5 hours on a Steam Deck LCD model. Temperatures were around 70 °C.
33 Immortals features rebindable controls, but otherwise has no accessibility options.
33 Immortals is an interesting co-op experience that doesn't hit always hit the mark. Co-op gameplay is solid, but you can feel disconnected from your allies. The progression systems are there, but feel muted. The combat is fun, and weapons are balanced, but are held back by the reliance on co-op, meaning you'll never feel powerful by yourself.
Performance on the Steam Deck is frankly disappointing; having an entirely 2D game set in small arenas drop as low as 20 FPS feels unacceptable. Hopefully, optimizations for CPU performance can come in, as that is the only issue with the game; the controls work perfectly well, as does the UI sizing.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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33 Immortals is an interesting concept, but ends up feeling like a watered-down Action RPG with minimal progression, environments, and content. Performance on the Steam Deck is also sub-par.
