You might not like it, but God has decided you need to spend the afterlife down in the pits of Hell. In fact, you don’t like it. You don’t like it so much that you’re going to fight back and break your way back out. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, really. Even so, that would be a pretty daunting task if you were on your own, but thankfully there’s literally dozens of you fighting for the exact same thing in 33 Immortals.
Now out in Early Access and Game Preview (with Xbox Game Pass), 33 Immortals should not be confused with that other game with a 33 in the title. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the JRPG, while 33 Immortals is a large scale co-op roguelike. You’d be forgiven for getting the names muddled up, though.
But what does a 33-player game actually look like? We’re mostly familiar with what a co-op action RPG looks like, and 33 Immortals generally looks like this kind of game, but the Diablos of this world typically keep you reigned in with four-player co-op, often playing with your friends and gabbing away as you do so. The closest parallel, and the stated desire from Thunder Lotus, is instead to capture the feel of an MMO raid, with the likes of World of Warcraft allowing parties of up to 30 to go together. As hinted by the name, the main mode in 33 Immortals sends 33 of you out into the Inferno to battle side-by-side. Sometimes.
You see, you’re not all spawned into the world together, but instead will appear in smaller groups that engender greater cooperation through the early part of a run. There’s a loose herd mentality of wanting to stick together to dispatch enemies more quickly, and then to delve into the Torture Chambers that are unlocked for you. These are challenge rooms that are limited to six players, with multiple Chambers opening up across the map, all of them needing to be completed to trigger the next stage of the run.
A stage-wide bombardment of flame attacks signals that, while golden rings surround your screen – no doubt a manifestation of God’s wrath – before fresh enemies spawn into the overworld and the next set of Chambers opens up. Completing Chambers is key to increasing your power, as they unlock one or two chests for you, filled with crystals and giving a stat-boosting Relic to marginally improve your stats. Each enemy defeated also drops purple ores that fill a meter until you can redeem them at a pedestal for a boost to damage, health or Empathy, which boosts your co-op.
It all builds up to a climactic battle against the three-headed ruler of this realm, though you first all need to gather at an ascension point and battle in a constricted arena to prove yourself worthy of this. Lucifer is a fascinating style of boss. Now with all the surviving players gathered together, the balancing act of damage and sponginess shifts. He actually has a whopping ten health bars for you to whittle away, while he summons mid-bosses and engages certain abilities that will wipe out swathes of your team if you don’t react quickly enough. One requires that you destroy his glowing bracelets, while another spawns seriously spongey crystals all across the map, needing you to destroy them all to even give yourself half an opening.
You don’t need to completely defeat him, though, as each health bar you chip away awards resources and keys to access the other levels – a 22-player Purgatorio stage that will up the ante. Each player can be revived once, returning with a fraction of their health and then their second failure ending their act of rebellion.
With so many players, roles are necessarily quite loose and generic. There’s four different weapons that define your character archetype. The Bow of Hope is what you start with through the opening tutorial, firing up to 6 arrows that then stay in place until you summon them back to your quiver, dealing damage to anything they pass through on the return trip. There’s more nuance to each of the others. The Sword of Justice is the tank, building up Justice points with every strike that are then quickly expended when blocking. The Daggers of Greed build up to let you perform a leaping attack, while the Staff of Sloth sends slowly arcing balls that slow enemies they hit, and can then push out a wider wave of slowing.
Each also has a special ability – the bow gives a volley of arrows for a few seconds, Sword provides bubble shields to allies, daggers let you and an ally get enemies to drop bones when hit, and the staff creates a super slow zone blanket that envelopes a patch of the screen. The unique trick here is that each ability requires one or two allies to come and stand in a rough formation in order to trigger it. That’s much easier said than done during the busiest battles.
I personally leant toward the Bow of Hope – it’s the first weapon I tried and I easily get set in my ways – letting me keep my distance and engage in more strategic positioning than with the daggers, but I inevitably felt quite underpowered when reaching the crystals stage of the battle with Lucifer.
Wrapped around this is a gradual roguelike progression system, pushing you to complete tasks, level up weapons, discover a gallery of relics that can boost you on the next run. It’s solid, if unremarkable while you’re trying to settle in on which weapon you prefer and start to focus your efforts around it – or you’ll probably want to save up and buy a pet companion to run around with you. Each return to the Dark Woods that is the pre-expedition hub sees half a dozen characters and vendors vying for your attention, the main one, and the architect of this general rebellion, being Beatrice.
There’s an engaging core to 33 Immortals, a minimalist tone to the combat that lets you focus on your one job while still working in tandem with allies nearby, and it builds up to a fever pitch as you ascend to the battle at the end of a run. There’s more to come for this game, with Thunder Lotus keeping the 11-player raid under wraps, but with just a few runs under my belt, I can easily see this becoming my go-to game for a medium pressure, medium length blast when I’ve got an hour to kill.
