There were a lot of mixed emotions for me going into “Forspoken” this week. The demo released for the game a few weeks back didn’t leave the best first impression, nor did the fact that review codes weren’t given to even the most popular of press outlets until essentially the game was released, it’s been nothing but red flags. So now that I’ve had a chance to play the game, a lot of my fears were justified, but at the same time, I still enjoyed myself playing it. It’s a strange sensation knowing you are playing a very flawed game, but invested enough to where you can’t help but keep playing, even if unfortunately, repetition gets the best of “Forspoken” early on.
You play as a nearly twenty-one-year-old New Yorker named Frey who gets transported to a fantastical world called Athia. A place where magic is indeed real and so are dark forces. It’s a very “Wizard of Oz” like story where it’s a stranger in a strange land. To overcome your enemies, you will learn how to use an assortment of magical powers to take down a variety of monsters and “The Break,” a magical fog that is covering up this world. This is where the monsters originate from, if animals get inside the fog, they get corrupted and mutated. To destroy “The Break” once and for all and to save this world, Frey must destroy four sorceresses called the Tantas. Each Tanta has their own set of unique abilities you must learn to overcome and defeat.
A big issue many people are having with “Forspoken” and I regretfully have to put myself in that group as well is that the character Frey isn’t very likable, at all. The writing constantly tries to be clever with trying to put in as many quips as possible, but it just gets cringey, very quickly. Unfortunately, that’s not the biggest issue with Frey, she is often rude and disrespectful to the people of Athia. Many of them are begging for her help and a lot of the time the responses are met with attitude from Frey. It sucks, I really wanted to give this game and this character the benefit of the doubt from everything I’ve been hearing, but it’s true, I just could not stand the person I was playing the entire time, which is a big, big problem for your video game.
The gameplay itself has its own set of mixed bag feelings, for example the traversal in the game is super fun, probably my favorite aspect of “Forspoken” is how fluid you are from doing cool magical parkour and grappling walls and so forth, it’s very entertaining. On the other side of this bag though, the combat is very repetitive and very easy. Even on normal difficulty, I kept thinking I was on the easiest difficulty. As you progress you do level up, which then gives you mana that you use to buy more skills in your current elemental skill tree, eventually you will get other skill trees, but the grind to leveling up one tree is not very rewarding, I often found myself just using the same attacks over and over the entire game, even when I got new abilities, my older ones were better since I leveled them up more.
Technically, there are also a few issues, if you play in performance mode, you can visually see a huge downgrade in the environment, where the resolution can go down as low as 720p. I chose to play in resolution mode, the frames per second weren’t as many, but the game isn’t all that difficult, so I didn’t feel like I needed them and I’d prefer to look at a visually beautiful game on my television. I don’t think this is the first time the Luminous engine has encountered these issues. I know Square Enix developed this engine, but at this point it feels like it’s not worth the hassle, just make the smart choice and move your games to the unreal engine. So, if you’re able to withstand cringe-inducing dialogue constantly for ten to fifteen hours (mostly with Frey talking to her magical talking bracelet) and don’t mind a less challenging experience, nor do you mind your lead protagonist to be a rather mean person then maybe this is worth checking out for you. I’m still shocked about all this, this game has writers like Gary Whitta, who wrote “Star Wars: Rogue One” for Pete’s sake. Todd Stashwick is also someone who I am a big fan of. I don’t know what happened here, but the final product wasn’t ultimately for me.
6.5/10
For more information, visit: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/forspoken/
Related: Nick Navarro Reviews
Gaming since I was given an original Nintendo as a kid. I love great storytelling and unique ingenuity. When both collide in a single game, I'm a happy gamer. Twitter/IG @NickNavarro87
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