Forspoken Review (PS5)

Forspoken is the first major game release of the year, that has managed to make quite some waves, but not the way the developers or the publisher would have wished for. The myth of Square Enix only bringing excellent games to its audience vanished a long time ago, but this action adventure with minimal roleplaying elements seems to be a bite that really got stuck in the throat of the legendary publisher. Read on to find out where this trip down the rabbit hole went awry.

Although set in a fantasy world, Forspoken starts in the most mundane way possible with just another young adult who has fallen through the cracks of society ending up in front of a judge who sees potential in her. Alfre Holland is 21 years old, and she has to fight her way through the challenges of living on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen as an orphan who has no one to count on. Her only support is her cat, Homer, who is presented as a short innuendo of things that are to come. Hint: cats, many cats.

After getting her hands on a mysterious bracelet, Frey ends up in Athia, a magical world full of wonders. Unfortunately, except for a few settlements, all the game world is missing any traces of sentient life. Sure, you have monsters, and zombies, yes zombies in a fantasy game, and cliffs and shiny crystals, but other than that the game world seems quite barren. Of course, there is an explanation for that throughout the story, but even the developers realized the gravity of the situation making fun of it through one of the always repeating conversations between Frey and Cuff.

Cuff is the name our hero gave her magical bracelet, that seems to know more about what is going on than he lets on, gradually dropping pieces of new intel. The introductory part of the game ends with you arriving in Cipal, the first main city you will visit. Here all your hopes and dreams regarding the ambitions of the game will be crushed. Beyond the main story that will lead you beyond the safety of the city walls, you can complete secondary missions such as chasing cats in order to find wooden puppets, feed goats and converse with the inhabitants of Athia in perfect English. All very heroic, not!

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Of course, there is an explanation for everything, but it is cringe more often than not. Almost as cringe as the faces of the people you will encounter. The facial animation is even worse than the script the actors were given, and the characters feel completely artificial and unrelatable. Even during cutscenes the faces seem void of any real emotion, and often are lacking details, making them look like death masks. Combined with the script that is beyond uninspired and lacking any trace of finesse, the end result are interactions that feel forced and completely off point. 

Thus, you will never feel a real connection to the world or its inhabitants, or even our hero, and going after the Tantas, the powerful women who rule these lands fails to trigger an emotional response from the players. You will do it because you are told to, not because you want to. The fault can also be found in the way Frey was built. Sure, she has a personality somewhere beyond all the posing, but it is so poorly written that you cannot really empathize with her on any level.

She is stuck between the orphan who had it rough, the young adult who doesn’t care, a strong and independent woman, a brat drunk on power, someone who just wants to get out of the mess and get home, and who knows how many other roles. There is no consistency in the way she is portrayed or her evolution along the story that tries to get its inspiration from Alice in Wonderland.

Her reactions are cut together poorly going from super over the top to mellow in a matter of seconds. Moreover, her reactions and banter with cuff are annoyingly repetitive and poorly coordinated. You will hear in the timespan of around ten minutes at least three times Cuff asking why she want to get back to New York and Frey giving the same answer, or you will hear Frey being surprised by a resource she already collected 150 times before. 

The story and the presentation are a mess, but maybe the gameplay makes it worthwhile to save Athia. After leaving Cipal you are presented with a ginormous open map in which basically you can do whatever you want, more correctly whatever you can do with the abilities you have already discovered. There are plenty of detours and secondary objectives, but many of them can be reached much later when you expand your arsenal of acrobatic moves. So, you try to focus on parkouring your way to the main objectives and unlocking new powers with the thought of fully exploring later on.

On your way you will only find monsters of various sizes that challenge you to best them using magic spells. The main spells Frey can use from her magic skill tree remind a lot of using a shotgun and an SMG, but instead of bullets you shoot magical crystals. The shooter inspiration theory gains even more legs when you encounter zombie hoards in the wild. Yes, entire zombie hoards in a fantasy game, that you can mow down using your spell that reminds awfully much of shooting a rifle.

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Later on, Frey will discover other magical skill trees with different spells and thus the flat and uninspired combat will become more complex. You will have to take into account the weaknesses of your enemies and their strengths, combining your different abilities to get out of often really unfavorable odds. Still, you will feel like choosing the best tools to deal with magic bullet sponges. Or, alternatively, you can go into the Accessibility menu of the game and tweak the options until Frey feels almost as overpowered as Superman.

But the most bloated aspect of the game remains its resource system. From the moment you land in Athia you will be able to collect different resources, without even knowing what they will be used for. There are over 30 resources that can be used to craft or improve equipment pieces that will help Frey in battle. Next to her cape and necklace, the players can also discover various designs of nail polish that improve our heroines’ abilities. Of course, you can equip separate ones for the right and the left hand.

Overall, the entire game feels rushed and off balance. It is like the developers spent almost all their time building the game world and they ran out of it when it came to filling it with content. They jammed everything they could think of in a rush, from parkour to almost shooter like combat, from “colectivitis” to pet adoration, from an overly bloated crafting system to unnecessarily complicated talent trees. The end result has some peak moments, but overall is not really enjoyable.

On the technical side Luminous Engine tries to steal the show, churning our remarkable performance on PS5. The performance mode with 120 Hz refresh rate and VRR offers a visually smooth parkouring experience, but the clumsy control brings you back to reality. The combat feels flat and an afterthought at best, but even the parkouring is not as smooth as we have seen in other games. For choosing the quality-focused settings and turning on ray tracing, the game rewards you with an impressive depth of field, detailed textures and subtle particle effects. But in certain areas using these settings the framerate drops can be quite painful.

The soundtrack is nothing to phone home about and the voice acting is just as mismatched as the script. This is not the fault of the voice actors, but of the sound engineers that weren’t very inspired with the material they got to work with. A lot of the dialogues between Fey and Cuff are beyond repetitive, and Frey’s reactions are mixed together without any consistency.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion