Forspoken (DEMO)

Forspoken is a game that released recently to somewhat mixed reviews. I haven’t read any, I don’t generally bother these days. I prefer to just watch some videos / streams of a game to see if it’s something I think I’ll like. In the case of Forspoken though, there was also a demo, which was rather handy. I don’t typically bother sharing demo impressions, but I wanted to about this one.

The first thing that struck me about Forspoken is how messy everything is. I think I entered the menu a couple of times, saw how much of a bloated mess it was and immediately quit out. There’s just too many screens, everything is weirdly placed and the inventory for ‘crafting’ supplies made me feel very tired and old.

The UI out of the menu isn’t much better and the controls don’t feel naturally intuitive. It took me 20 minutes or so to finally stop bringing up my power selection rather than actually firing the damn things. Movement felt strange and imprecise. Combat felt clumsy and oversaturated with particle effects.

But, by the end of the demo (40 minutes or so) I think I was actually starting to enjoy myself. As a demo, if certainly drops you in at the deep end giving you a lot more spells and abilities than you’d begin the actual game with. There is a small tutorial, but it’s not very good. The intention, I guess, is to let you see how the combat progresses as you play and how much you can unlock but within the demo, it just feels like too much at once.

It reminds me of the Tales of Arise demo I also wrote about in which I said ‘I didn’t have a f**king clue what was going on. I was winning fights, but I didn’t really know how.’ I felt exactly the same about Forspoken. The demo gives you a lot of tools to play with but little explanation or direction. However, once I did start to get my head around it and began to combine movement and attack, things did start to click and suddenly things began making a lot more sense.

That said, whilst the gameplay began to win me over, the world itself felt a little empty and bland, as did the enemies. In terms of performance, I didn’t have any issues running it, although the full release does seem to be suffering from some technical issues if the Steam reviews are any indication.

So I guess the question is, did the demo convince me enough to pick it up? Well, not now and certainly not at £64.99. Come the f**k on. Even if I loved the demo I’d have second thoughts at that price. But on sale? Sure, I can see myself picking this up some way down the line. And, based on the reviews, I have a feeling the discounts will be rolling out a lot sooner than later.