2.5/5 ★ – cha0sknightmare's review of Forspoken.

Let’s not beat around the bush…Forspoken was almost destined to be a flop. It had a dreadful buildup to its release, overshadowed by meme videos and countless YouTubers tearing apart its cutscenes and dialogue. The game's marketing was equally abysmal, utterly failing to showcase any of Forspoken's strengths. The marketing team seemed to dig themselves deeper with each trailer (and a confusing mid-game tutorial-less demo), undoubtedly sealing the game’s fate before anyone was even willing to give it a chance. But behind the controversy, I feel Forspoken is better than people would have you believe. Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. But there are some truly good ideas here with the foundations of a great game hidden below some annoying baggage. Forspoken follows the story of Frey, an orphan living a rough life of petty crime in New York, before being whisked away to the fantastical world of Athia. This is an Isekai, and we learn about Athia, its inhabitants, and its struggles as Frey does. Frey as a character has been picked apart by countless videos and memes for her "Whedon-like" dialogue and delivery. While this is definitely part of her character, I think it’s more of a matter of taste. If you can overlook the style and accept it for what it is, Frey’s performance is actually quite well done and her voice actor brings a lot of heart to the role. Outside of Frey and “Cuff” the metal bangle that acts as her side-kick of sorts, the rest of the cast is pretty bland and forgettable. There are very few moments for characters to bond, connect, or interact, and when those moments do happen, they’re never enough to create any real resonance with the player. The storytelling suffers from constant pacing whiplash, the game speeding past plot points that should be given time to marinate, and spending far too long on things that it doesn’t need to. The entire middle section of this game flies by before you have any chance to soak in the monumental story events that take place. This hurts the game massively, because the lore behind Athia and the Tantas (it’s god-like figures) is actually really interesting, and it’s clear if you stop to read the notes and codex entries that the studio have spent a lot of time crafting this world, it’s events and its history. Luckily, the gameplay side of Forspoken has quite a lot to offer. The combat is reminiscent of the Infamous games, with third-person shooter style controls for casting different spells, and a strong emphasis on movement and traversal. There are various offensive and defensive spells to unlock and enhance, spread across multiple skill trees with different elements and movement options. The ability to flip between these elements on the fly during combat opens up countless creative possibilities, adding a nice sense of player freedom to the combat. All of this is augmented with the Playstation 5’s Dual Sense controller; the adaptive triggers giving various spells tactile feedback, and Cuff’s dialogue also comes through the controller speaker to. The game also features a "Magic Parkour" system, which triples up as your sprint, "auto-dodge," and traversal mechanic for climbing ledges and rock faces. As long as you're holding the button, and Frey has the energy to maintain it, she will automatically dodge all forms of incoming damage in an flashy way. While it’s not the deepest system, it’s a refreshing change from the typical "parry" mechanics we see in many other games. The traversal options also expand as you unlock additional elements, with spells that essentially function as a grapple hook and a surfboard. When the environment is at its best, it allows you to alternate between these abilities in a fun and creative way, letting you get around quickly via well timed use of them. Unfortunately, a large part of Forspoken is its sprawling open world.. it's beautiful to look at, in all of its “break” ridden beauty, but from a gameplay perspective, it feels dull and almost void of anything interesting to actually do. It's really just your typical "Ubisoft" open world, unnecessarily huge, bloated to the brim with tick box exercises, and void of any engaging stories or threads that make you actually want to engage with it. Forspoken does offer up rewards in the form of cosmetics, mana and various stat upgrades, but there is just soooo much of it... if you are anything like me, once you've sampled the archetypes (none of which are that creative), you'll check out pretty quickly. The open world system also brings a real balancing problem to the game, with the developers never knowing how much each player will invest into the open world between each main story chapter, and therefore unable to balance the enemy health and damage as a result. I had to adjust the difficulty here various times, just to try and achieve a balance where enemies didn’t feel unfairly spongey, or on the complete opposite end of the scale - totally underpowered. Even some of the boss fights suffered from this, where I annihilated bosses that the game had built up to, before they even really got started. One thing I will mention is that Forspoken is a looker, the world of Athia is beautiful and the particle effects during combat are stunning. There is also elements of strong art direction here, especially with the different Tanta’s and council members designs. Forspoken boasts a 60fps performance mode that mostly holds stable even during the busiest moments, a 30fps Raytracing mode, or a 30fps/4k mode, the game offers options and I'm always a fan of that. Forspoken has many flaws and its lack of a cohesive game design vision hurts it overall. The huge open world clearly took lots of development time, but for what it adds to the game it doesn’t feel worth it. The story has promise but needed more time to breathe, and while the combat systems are fun, balancing issues cause constant friction. What we do have here is a strong base for the future with great ideas though. Unfortunately, while the game did receive a DLC, It’s developers; Luminous Studios, were shut down shortly after, and with the games negative reputation the chances of a sequel are pretty much zero. Shame.