Forspoken -PS5- 5

August 19, 2023

I was looking forward to this one before it came out, and then I saw the mediocre reviews when it came out, and decided to wait for a price drop. I saw it on a Fourth of July sale for basically a third of the original price, so I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately, I can’t quite give this Forspoken a recommendation. It’s just meh, right there in the middle.

The lead character, Frey is unlikable, as was the whole cast of characters. I didn’t care about anyone in the boring city of Celia, and the revelations about Frey’s origins towards the end come off as schmaltzy. The tragedy with Oleivia around the beginning of the game also felt forced. The whole story and characters were rather lame and forgettable. Sometimes Frey and cuff sound like a bickering married couple, but other times Frey is just a bitch and tells Cuff to “F off”. This game would have been rated E for Everyone, but it earns its M rating simply by Frey using the F word every few sentences.

Zipping around and doing parkour across the open land looks cool and is kinda fun, and the combat is okay (I liked Sila’s sword techniques that you get half way through the game), but it does get a bit repetitive after a short while. Thankfully the game doesn’t take too long to finish. And it’s easy enough that you don’t have to do too much sidequesting throughout the playthrough.

Overall, the game is not quite as bad as some would lead you to believe, but it’s not very good either. It’s just really average and forgettable. 5 out of ten. I remember thinking this looked like a live action Disney/MCU movie from the realistic graphics when I first saw it. And in the end, it turned out feeling pretty much like a low tier entry in the MCU, complete with self referential humor, cringe-inducing writing, and a formulaic plot about a girl with super powers “overcoming the odds and finding herself”.