It's safe to say that Forspoken ended up a major critical and commercial failure for Square-Enix, what with the very mixed reception from critics and the studio behind this game no longer in existence. With all that said, was this failure warranted?
Forspoken has received a lot of criticism for its writing and having finished the game it's probably one of the game's biggest faults, and the game overall fails to live up to its potential, but that's not to say there isn't anything here that works.
The combat and traversal can come together quite well, and there were certainly times I was actually having a lot of fun, but even saying that, the game can get quite repetitive later in the story, and I didn't really enjoy most of the story boss fights. The enemy variety is decent, though it's hard to remember most of them.
Despite the fact that the main story in this is relatively short, the game can feel soooo slow at times. The early game is incredibly dull, and Chapter 11 specifically had absolutely glacial pacing, just made me want the game to end sooner.
The writing is pretty shoddy as well, with our protagonist Frey becoming very unlikable towards the latter half of the game, and her dialogue comes across as very try-hard, like a 50-60 year old executive's idea of how a modern 20 year old woman would sound. The cursing felt particularly excessive, this has rarely bothered me in a game before, but here it just felt so forced whenever Frey would utter something profane, I could see the game trying to be relatable and it just wasn't working at all.
It doesn't help that Frey and her arm-bound companion Cuff simply do not stop talking. Open a chest, dialogue, defeat an enemy, dialogue, fall from a height, dialogue, find a lair or point of interest, dialogue. After a while you tune it out, but it can be genuinely quite obnoxious how little they shut up. This can be toggled in the accessibility settings, but the frequency on the default setting is already way too much.
I do think the lore and world of Athia is somewhat interesting, and I did want to see where the story was going in spite of how trite the dialogue could be, but the game certainly didn't make it easy.
The presentation can feel PS3-like at times, tons of fades to black between gameplay and cutscenes, stilted character animations during gameplay, poor lip-syncing at times, among many other performance issues like crashes and an unstable frame-rate. The game doesn't look particularly exceptional so I don't feel this is warranted either.
Despite all this negativity however, I do feel the gameplay holds the game together enough that I did not regret my time playing it, and I will probably play some of the post-game content before calling it quits.
5/10 for now, depending how I feel about the post-game it may go up, but yeah wait for a deep sale before considering this one.
Forspoken has received a lot of criticism for its writing and having finished the game it's probably one of the game's biggest faults, and the game overall fails to live up to its potential, but that's not to say there isn't anything here that works.
The combat and traversal can come together quite well, and there were certainly times I was actually having a lot of fun, but even saying that, the game can get quite repetitive later in the story, and I didn't really enjoy most of the story boss fights. The enemy variety is decent, though it's hard to remember most of them.
Despite the fact that the main story in this is relatively short, the game can feel soooo slow at times. The early game is incredibly dull, and Chapter 11 specifically had absolutely glacial pacing, just made me want the game to end sooner.
The writing is pretty shoddy as well, with our protagonist Frey becoming very unlikable towards the latter half of the game, and her dialogue comes across as very try-hard, like a 50-60 year old executive's idea of how a modern 20 year old woman would sound. The cursing felt particularly excessive, this has rarely bothered me in a game before, but here it just felt so forced whenever Frey would utter something profane, I could see the game trying to be relatable and it just wasn't working at all.
It doesn't help that Frey and her arm-bound companion Cuff simply do not stop talking. Open a chest, dialogue, defeat an enemy, dialogue, fall from a height, dialogue, find a lair or point of interest, dialogue. After a while you tune it out, but it can be genuinely quite obnoxious how little they shut up. This can be toggled in the accessibility settings, but the frequency on the default setting is already way too much.
I do think the lore and world of Athia is somewhat interesting, and I did want to see where the story was going in spite of how trite the dialogue could be, but the game certainly didn't make it easy.
The presentation can feel PS3-like at times, tons of fades to black between gameplay and cutscenes, stilted character animations during gameplay, poor lip-syncing at times, among many other performance issues like crashes and an unstable frame-rate. The game doesn't look particularly exceptional so I don't feel this is warranted either.
Despite all this negativity however, I do feel the gameplay holds the game together enough that I did not regret my time playing it, and I will probably play some of the post-game content before calling it quits.
5/10 for now, depending how I feel about the post-game it may go up, but yeah wait for a deep sale before considering this one.