![]() The game’s open world offers plenty of side quests too. "The combat encourages a healthy amount of experimentation." Once you get fairly deep into the skill tree and unlock a few more options for movement and combat, Forspoken really kicks it into high gear. Rather than “leveling up”, you get experience as you go about exploring and fighting things, both of which can be spent on getting new abilities, both active and passive. Forspoken has a thoroughly in-depth skill tree where unlocks happen in a more free-form way than restricting it to level requirements. There’s also a fair bit of variety in all the ways you can take on encounters. Really, the only downside here is that the game’s control scheme feels a bit unwieldy sometimes, especially if you’re using a rapid fire spell that forces you to constantly mash on the trigger. Even the game’s boss fights, best exemplified by an early-game encounter where you have to take on a massive dragon through multiple phases of the fight, the boss gets new abilities, and new movesets throughout fight. The combat encourages a healthy amount of experimentation. The movement options make exploring the open world a blast, especially once you get a hang of it. On the flipside, when it actually lets you play, Forspoken is incredibly fun. On the whole, the story is, at best, does well as an excuse to set you free on the world of Athia. Even if you can make them talk less, they still end up talking a bit too much, and the things they say aren’t particularly well-written. ![]() Sure, there’s an option to reduce the chatter between the two, and while this does help quite a bit in regular gameplay, unfortunately, it doesn’t really help the general quality of writing between the two characters in the game’s cutscenes. "The character writing for Frey and Cuff often feels like it was written to pad out time for cutscenes." Strangely enough, the character writing for Frey and Cuff often feels like it was written to pad out time for cutscenes. Her conversations with Cuff come off as especially annoying, especially since these conversations often keep circling the same subjects constantly. Just about any time she opens her mouth, from the game’s opening hours to well into its plot, she’s bound to say something stupid. She’s incredibly chatty, which, while not bad in and of itself, starts getting annoying once it becomes clear that she isn’t a particularly well-written character. Forspoken will constantly interrupt the game in order to let us know what Frey and Cuff think about the situation they currently find themselves in, which, unfortunately, soured me on the story quite early on.įrey is especially emblematic of this problem as a character. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that Frey and Cuff are both incredibly talkative. The game likes to think that its story is incredibly important, and regardless of the quality of the story itself, playing the game is often going to be much more enjoyable without the story getting in the way. Every single time the game lets you actually play it control is quickly taken away again in service of yet another largely-unnecessary cutscene or conversation where more exposition is thrown your way. While the game likes to think that it’s starting off with a bang, Forspoken’s biggest issues become obvious right from the outset: it’s deathly afraid to let players do much of anything, especially early on. "In many ways, Forspoken seems like two games clubbed together that are incredibly different." ![]() Accompanying Frey in her travels is the rather talkative fashion accessory that goes by Cuff, and off they go on their merry adventure. Through a series of events, Frey finds herself the target of a local gang, and in pondering what to do about her situation, finds herself mysteriously transported to the world of Athia. At its worst, however, Forspoken is constantly interrupting whatever you’re doing to throw exposition your way, regardless of whether or not the situation might call for it.įorspoken puts you in the shoes of Frey – a young woman in New York City who constantly finds herself on the wrong side of the law. At its best, Forspoken is a really fun game with great mobility options, an interesting combat system, and a simple but fun world to explore. In many ways, Forspoken seems like two games clubbed together that are incredibly different, and most of the time, are constantly at odds with each other. ![]() It feels like a strange return to games from the PS2 era – a time when development budgets weren’t so high as to make taking risks difficult. Although Forspoken is developed and published by Japanese companies, the game uses many conventions that are more often found in games developed by western studios: an open world filled with things to do, an American protagonist, and a setting that’s more inspired by medieval fantasy than Eastern fantasy.
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