I have a soft spot for open worlds that focus on traversal movement that you will use to move from A to B even if the activities that you are doing are pretty standard. I enjoyed a lot of them such as Marvel’s Spider-Man, Sunset Overdrive, Solar Ash, and even Sonic Frontiers.
Looking at Forspoken, the movement looks fluent, but playing it is a completely different story. Regular movement is so slow, it feels like I’m on gravity 24/7 especially when the game wants you to jump over anything that isn’t barren empty fields and it’s so sluggish. It has the complete opposite problem of Sonic Frontiers where that game’s animations are stiff as hell, but moving around feels way smoother than I anticipated it and you go fast unlike Forspoken that does have smooth animations, but controlling the character doesn’t feel good or fun at all.
Unfortunately, the magic parkour doesn’t fix this. It creates even more problems because trying to grapple on certain highlighted rocks that launch you higher makes the camera freak out by keep going down automatically whenever I use that focus aim and it annoyed me so much that I avoided using them because the game’s camera is terrible due to having a hard time aiming to keep my flow going to do any basic parkour. This was done better in Solar Ash with slow-motion & free camera in first person that was more responsive when using that focus aim.
I know that I’m harping on the movement so much, but for a game that is focusing on that aspect consistently to move around the open world from my experience. If the core fundamental movement isn’t fun at all to control, the game completely feels apart for me because it then really highlights other aspects like the open world or combat are just painfully generic or tedious to do.
I would be singing the same tune about Marvel’s Spider-Man if the web swinging wasn’t fun to use at all, but it is, and that made the game very fun for me to do activities even if they are pretty standard because that gives me more excuses to web swing around the open world & it never gets old for me. Same with Sonic in Sonic Frontiers, boosting through the open zones to collect stuff, beating up enemies, or going to the piss easy puzzles is just very fun even if they are nothing special at all. Going from my marked waypoint to another one in both of these games is so smooth & fun that I barely used the fast travel system in either game, which tells me that they did something right. I don’t feel that with Forspoken whatsoever during my experience, I wanted to use fast travel at every opportunity that I could.
Overall, after several hours. I just gave up on this game and not having the energy to keep going due to how boring the overall package is and having character movement that doesn’t feel good or fun to use across the board. Just play these other games that I compared to this slog, especially Solar Ash.
Looking at Forspoken, the movement looks fluent, but playing it is a completely different story. Regular movement is so slow, it feels like I’m on gravity 24/7 especially when the game wants you to jump over anything that isn’t barren empty fields and it’s so sluggish. It has the complete opposite problem of Sonic Frontiers where that game’s animations are stiff as hell, but moving around feels way smoother than I anticipated it and you go fast unlike Forspoken that does have smooth animations, but controlling the character doesn’t feel good or fun at all.
Unfortunately, the magic parkour doesn’t fix this. It creates even more problems because trying to grapple on certain highlighted rocks that launch you higher makes the camera freak out by keep going down automatically whenever I use that focus aim and it annoyed me so much that I avoided using them because the game’s camera is terrible due to having a hard time aiming to keep my flow going to do any basic parkour. This was done better in Solar Ash with slow-motion & free camera in first person that was more responsive when using that focus aim.
I know that I’m harping on the movement so much, but for a game that is focusing on that aspect consistently to move around the open world from my experience. If the core fundamental movement isn’t fun at all to control, the game completely feels apart for me because it then really highlights other aspects like the open world or combat are just painfully generic or tedious to do.
I would be singing the same tune about Marvel’s Spider-Man if the web swinging wasn’t fun to use at all, but it is, and that made the game very fun for me to do activities even if they are pretty standard because that gives me more excuses to web swing around the open world & it never gets old for me. Same with Sonic in Sonic Frontiers, boosting through the open zones to collect stuff, beating up enemies, or going to the piss easy puzzles is just very fun even if they are nothing special at all. Going from my marked waypoint to another one in both of these games is so smooth & fun that I barely used the fast travel system in either game, which tells me that they did something right. I don’t feel that with Forspoken whatsoever during my experience, I wanted to use fast travel at every opportunity that I could.
Overall, after several hours. I just gave up on this game and not having the energy to keep going due to how boring the overall package is and having character movement that doesn’t feel good or fun to use across the board. Just play these other games that I compared to this slog, especially Solar Ash.