![]() ![]() ![]() Take a close look at my fight with these low-level crocodiles. It’s just too bad the precision makes combat feel like a clunky spamfest at worst and an annoying uphill battle to master the strategy you can envision at best.įinally, my least favorite aspect of the combat is the enemy mob design there are far too many enemies for most mob encounters. There’s a lot of variety in your moveset and combat style. I understand this fast-paced combat will be enjoyable for some, but I found it sloppy and unrefined, brimming with strategic possibilities. The fast pace of combat means you’re going to be turning around a lot to reorient yourself from the fast parkouring. ![]() That said, I often found myself attacking the wrong enemies because the target locks off when you fly past them, or the enemy goes just a tad off-screen for a moment. ![]() Moving around the field, targeting enemies for ranged or close-up attacks is swift, thanks to hot-key toggles for the two combat types (close/ranged). However, the clunky movement and padded enemy mob design really deflate an otherwise strategically satisfying combat system. The combat can be fun, with the large arsenal of magic abilities tailored to enemy weaknesses. But I suppose precision wasn’t the aim of the gameplay for Forspoken it’s fast-paced parkour with over-the-top magic combat. Remember how slow and “realistic” the movement in Red Dead Redemption 2 was? This game has a slice of that realistic animation that makes movement feel clunky and cumbersome at times. A lot of the sloppiness in movement can be attributed to the hefty animations weighing the precision down. Slingshotting yourself to distant ledges and onto enemies is fun, too, but it can be sloppy and imprecise when scaling a mountain or in the heat of a 20-enemy ambush. Sloppy platforming aside, stringing parkour combos by timing the jump button as you auto-parkour with the circle button is satisfying. Thankfully, there’s no fall damage you just get penalized with drained stamina when your parkour goes south and you fall off a 100-foot mountain. I found myself hung up awkwardly on cliff edges with little way to recover besides spamming the auto parkour button to reset the magical jumping. Parkouring is fun in general, but there’s a lack of precise control, which can lead to sloppy platforming. Still, Forspoken doesn’t do anything interesting with any of it besides the parkour aspect, and even that isn’t necessarily perfect. This looks like a lush fantasy world with all the enchanted rivers, ancient steeples, and impressive mountain ranges in the draw distance. It’s too bad there’s just not much to interact with or do in the open world besides parkour and fighting enemies because the art direction is solid. You’re free to explore a sizable portion of the world map, with a copious amount of verticality in the numerous cliffs and crags you can jump over. And thankfully, the demo emphasizes parkour above all else (well, besides the awful banter). That being said, the traversal is fun and probably the highlight of the entire demo. Trailers and gameplay from the full game have more characters and interesting story tidbits between them, so we’ll see if the world is more populated with people to talk to and worldbuilding/story outside of the menu explanations. Still, it’s certainly not going to appeal to those wanting interesting character interactions or character development. As a result, the world felt utterly lifeless and dead, which, I suppose, can be explained in-lore as a result of the Break. What did set off some red flags was the complete lack of any NPCs or characters whatsoever throughout the entirety of the demo. Yes, the 1-minute narration is essentially all the plot you get, but I don’t mind that too much since the point of a demo isn’t to be story-focused. This cataclysm explains why there’s nobody around and so many monsters and annoying bird enemies. There’s something about a Break in the world of Athia, too. It starts with a generic narration of the basic premise: an annoying New Yorker girl is isakaied into a fantasy world, with a talking cufflink giving her supernatural parkour abilities. The demo, understandably, doesn’t give too much of this away. The next aspect that many are curious about is the story. There’s an option to turn down the frequency of the banter, but it doesn’t save the poor presentation of the characters so far. Frey constantly comes off as immature and whiny, and her magical cuff ain’t much better. First, let’s get the obvious out of the way the dialogue between Frey and her magical cuff is every bit as cringe and annoying as the trailers made it seem. Not because the demo lacks content quite the contrary, this demo offers lots to explore. The PS5 demo for Square Enix’s Forspoken just released over the weekend, and I’m not overly impressed. ![]()
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