Assassin's Creed Black Flag meets Fable in this awesome new RPG

While perusing the games at Summer Game Fest I got to try out one of Amazon’s upcoming releases, New World: Aeternum, and I’ve got to say I was pleasantly surprised by it.

It’s an RPG you can play online, packing an interesting story, decent combat, and an open world filled with likeable characters and mysteries to solve.

Check out the trailer for the game below

After an admittedly lacklustre opening that teaches you the game’s controls aboard an exploding ship, the game drops the player off in Aeternum, a form of afterlife where if you die you come right back to life, perfectly fine, sometimes. Apparently some come back “wrong” with no real thought in their heads, just the instinct to lash out and attack.

That’s unfortunately what became of your crew, including the captain who’s being controlled by an unseen force that’s bringing chaos to the lands.

Starting off with choosing your character, you can customise your look as well as what class you’d like to be, which dictate the weapons and other equipment you start off with. Like most games I play I went for whichever character carried an enormous greatsword on their back, but there were loads to choose from and admittedly I’d be tempted to try some of the others on another playthrough.

You get one melee weapon and one ranged weapon, with mine being a very satisfying blunderbuss which absolutely shredded hordes of enemies with ease.

Amazon

After time the combat does start to feel a tad repetitive, but you can spice it up with the in-game skill tree, which provides upgrades for your current skills as well as unlocks new ones to use, like mighty sword slashes or different effects for your ranged weapon. There were quite a few to choose from, though of course many are locked behind a certain level so you’re not too overpowered at the beginning. I liked that I also had the option to respec all of my points should I choose too, with the first respec being free.

But what about Aeternum? Well it’s quite pretty I’ll give it that. It’s essentially an enormous island filled with wild animals and the aforementioned angry possessed corpses as well as a mysterious energy that’s apparently the source of the disturbance. Meeting with some of the characters who’d been there a while gave me a better lay of the land, as well as acted as additional tutorials for things like hunting, crafting and taking on missions.

What I liked the most though is that I wasn’t alone on the journey, as other players could be seen wandering the same island, though of course doing things differently depending on where they were up to in the game.

Some even lent me a helping hand if they were in the same area I was when fighting enemies, but there was nothing to say I had to play with other players, it was entirely up to me how I wanted to experience the game.

Amazon

In terms of progression it’s a lot like any other RPG, you take on bad guys, level up your character and open loads of chests filled with goodies, like new weapons, armour and more. While the enemy variety and combat did feel a bit repetitive towards the end of my play session, I’d give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s just because I was fairly early in the game’s story, and possibly even a tad overleveled for certain parts of the demo.

All in all though I liked what I played of New World: Aeturnum, and I’d be up to revisit the mysterious world and its many faces when the game comes on 15 October later this year for Xbox, PlayStation and PC platforms.