Now Playing: Forspoken

Forspoken is a game that released to some rather mixed reviews and after playing it myself I can now see why. Overall, I did have a pretty good time with the game but unfortunately there are many aspects of Forspoken that just feel . . . unfinished.

You play as Frey, a young woman from New York who is pulled through a magical portal into the fantasy world of Athia. Accompanied by a talking bracelet, Frey discovers she possesses magical abilities of her own. Although initially focused on finding a way home, Frey comes to reluctantly accept her role as a hero and save the people of Athia from a deadly corruption that is spreading across the land.

I remember a lot of people being critical of Frey and her dialogue from some of the promotional material prior to release but I don’t really get why. I’m not saying the game doesn’t have any clumsy lines or jokes that don’t really land, but it’s certainly no worse than I’ve seen in dozens of other games. I guess it’s because she’s a woman and she’s confident and sarcastic and that’s fine when it’s Nathan Drake making bad puns, but not Frey? Come the f**k on.

Frey is great as far as I’m concerned. She’s a fun protagonist who keeps things light, tries to make the best of her dire circumstances and genuinely enjoys the power she possesses. Is her journey and development through the game from reluctant hero to saviour of Athia somewhat predictable? Sure. But it works well enough. And yes, the story has some twists that aren’t exactly hard to see coming.

The world and lore of Athia is actually pretty well done which is why it’s such a shame the game both in terms of content and story feels unfinished. The opening in New York is pretty rough and feels knocked together on the cheap. But then you enter Athia – a massive and gorgeous open world of diverse landscapes littered with the ruins of a fallen empire.

Your traversal through this world is fast and fluid thanks to a ‘magical parkour’ system that begins as a fast run, but later expands to super powered leaps and a fiery grappling hook that lets you swing and propel yourself through the air. And yes, this magical movement also factors into combat which is the real highlight of Forspoken.

You begin with a single school of magic (Earth) which, like the other schools you’ll unlock is split between three ‘attack’ spells and several ‘support’ spells. As you fight you’ll build your ‘surge’ magic which is essentially your ultimate attack that deals massive damage over a wide area. You can dodge enemy attacks using your parkour and counter as you move. It’s very fast, very fluid and very, very fun, especially when you begin to combine support and attack spells from different schools of magic. I’m always going to like combat that gives me plenty of tools to play with and let’s me be creative with them.

Even with just the Earth magic unlocked I was having a real blast fighting my way through Forspoken. Enemies range from big, heavy hitting solo monsters, to swarms of easy to kill but numerous critters and zombies. Enemies also have particular weaknesses to certain types of magic so, in the later game, you’ll often face packs of enemies which require you to switch between schools on the fly.

Earth magic leads to Fire, and Fire as you might expect to Water, each of which offers a varied range of spells for both attack and support. I expected the last school to be Wind, but it’s actually based on Illusion and saturating enemies with magic darts that you can then explode en mass. It’s really fun, which is why it’s such a shame you don’t unlock it until the very end of the game and can only really explore its potential in the post-game.

I first noticed how unfinished Forspoken felt in some of the early side quests in the City of Cipal – the last human bastion in this ravaged world. Some of these quests were just . . . bad. And they’d often end not with an animation to show you completing your menial task, but a simple text box on a black background saying ‘You Did Thing’.

The side content in the open world is also incredibly repetitive. Each region essentially has the same selection of several tasks but honestly, I didn’t mind too much because they’re nearly all focused upon going to a location and killing monsters. And because I was enjoying the combat so much, I was more than happy to keep doing so. There are also spellcraft challenges you can unlock to boost your abilities and I enjoyed working my way through all of those.

Also in the open world are crafting materials. So. Many. Crafting. Materials. But honestly, the whole crafting and gear system feels like an unfinished mess. I like the idea of the cloaks, necklaces and nails that you can use to augment your abilities, but it’s something you probably won’t need or really want to engage much with until the post-game when maxing out your abilities becomes a lot more important as you’ll be tackling tougher content.

Where the game really feels and is clearly unfinished is when you’re heading to the third boss after obtaining the Fire and Water magic. You’re transported close to the boss location which feels kind of jarring and then, after obtaining the magic, you’re essentially railroaded through a series of exposition dumps to the final boss over the course of 20 minutes or so. Exposition dumps, I should add, that are largely just dialogue spoken over concept art.

What you learn isn’t bad, as such, but it’s all rushed through and portrayed so poorly and before you know it you’re fighting the final boss and the game is over. It’s like the last Act of the game had to be knocked together in a few weeks and this is the best they could do. It does, sadly, kind of spoil the entire experience and the story as a whole.

This unfinished feeling also then extends to the monsters. Up to this point the game has kept introducing new enemy types which – although not super interesting from a design point of view – at least give you some diversity to how you approach combat and utilise your magic. But once you hit the third boss, pretty much all the enemies you face are just ‘phantom’ versions of the rest. I’d call it lazy, but I really think it’s a case of the developers running out of time.

Fortunately, the game does at least give you a lot to do post-game. There’s still lots of regions to explore with tougher battles to fight. You have a new school of magic to learn and upgrade. It’s almost like what the last Act should have been before the final boss as you traverse the world with all of your abilities and spells and then when you’re ready, you’d have to put all of them to the test in the final battle.

Visually, Forspoken looks great and runs perfectly. It also loads ridiculously fast. For me, it’s very much a game I consider a flawed gem. There is a really good game buried in here but it’s like the game was simply too ambitious for the time or budget and as a result, not all of it feels complete. It’s a real shame, because I did really enjoy the game and I really liked Frey. But I also can’t deny all the problems the game has and how it largely falls apart in the final act. I’d still recommend checking it out on sale though. You might just be surprised.

6/10

Gallery: Tears of the Kingdom

Now Playing: Mass Effect 2 Remastered

Replaying Mass Effect 2 was kind of a weird experience in the sense that although I’ve played through the game multiple times in the past and for nearly as many hours as Mass Effect 1, I didn’t recall that much about the actual missions in the game going into this remaster. And once I did get stuck into ME2 again, I realised why – there’s nothing very memorable about much of the content in ME2 in terms of the actual missions.

The characters are what makes ME2 such a great experience. I’m sure I’ve said before that ME2 is less about the mission on which you embark and more about the people you take with you. The overall plot isn’t as interesting or compelling as that in ME1 and the Collectors – the main villains of ME2 – aren’t as fun or engaging to fight as the Geth were in ME1.

In fact, the core missions revolving around the Collectors isn’t particularly substantial. There’s only really a handful of core missions that advance the main plot and the only one that really stands out is the famous ‘suicide’ mission at the very end. The bulk of the ‘main’ content in ME2 revolves around recruiting your team and gaining their loyalty.

It’s still ‘main’ content but it’s not directly related to the core plot and you don’t actually need to do much of it at all if all you really want to do is reach the end. Of course, if you do that, the suicide mission probably won’t go very well. But I think that’s what makes ME2 special – the range of possibilities and potential character deaths that can occur based upon your choices and the content you choose to tackle.

The suicide mission itself is fun, if a little lacklustre in terms of actual combat because, as I’ve said, the Collectors don’t make the most exciting villains. The best missions in ME2 in terms of combat are still those in which you’re fighting the Geth. And the main plot just isn’t as good as that in ME1 in the way it plays out. I mean, it ends with you fighting a ridiculous giant terminator head . . . it’s not quite the fight against Saren on the Citadel.

Saren gave the Reapers a face in ME1 but in ME2 we just have the booming voice of Harbinger who seems to have a serious hate boner for Shepard. It’s kind of sad considering how the Reapers were portrayed in ME1 and how they are developed in ME2, particularly when you finish The Arrival DLC and they start to feel more like stereotypical villains than the technological Lovecraftian nightmares that was portrayed in ME1.

That’s not to say I hate the direction they took or that the main plot is bad, it’s just not terribly exciting compared to that of ME1. The main missions of ME1 and the way the plot was paced and developed was just far more memorable and exciting. In ME2, the core plot stuff almost takes a back seat to the focus on your team. Luckily, it’s a really great f**king team.

The characters of ME2 are what make it such a great game to play. You have some characters returning from ME1, but a lot of new characters too. It’s the kind of game where you’re really spoilt for choice. ME2 simply has one of, if arguably not the best cast in a video game. I love all the characters, even the DLC characters who fit in perfectly.

That said, their actual missions – both recruitment and loyalty – are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are great, but others are pretty short and lacklustre, like the developers didn’t really know what to do for the character. The good ones, I remembered. The meh ones, not so much or at all. Overall, the balance leans more to good than mediocre, but it’s another reason why I recall the characters far more than the actual mission content related to those characters.

The combat, it has to be said, is a big improvement over ME1. Whilst it may seem more limited – each character only has access to a small handful of abilities compared to ME1 – those abilities are more impactful on the battlefield and can be combined in strategic (and fun) ways. Enemies now have different shielding types – armour, shields or biotic barriers (or a combination of all three) and you’ll need to switch between different abilities or ammo types to punch through.

Combat is more engaging, the AI is much better and although ME2 strips away a lot of the more RPG heavy stats and inventory systems that were present in ME1, I’d say it’s for the best purely in terms of the moment to moment combat. You’ll also need to manage your ammo (sorry, thermal clips) another change that feels a little weird, but admittedly works better in terms of the actual combat.

Planet scanning for resources is kind of tedious, but thankfully you don’t really need to do too much of it. The DLC content is pretty great, especially Shadow Broker, but Arrival, whilst not bad, was a worrying sign of things to come in ME3 at release and remains a sign of where things started to go wrong. Visually, ME2 still holds up today. Calling this a ‘remaster’ is a bit of a stretch, but it’s nice to have all the content bundled together.

Overall, ME2 remains an excellent game that in some areas is better than ME1 – combat and characters – but worse in others – missions and plot. I guess all that’s left for me to do now is face my demons and play ME3 again.

8/10

Steam Summer Sale: Damage Report

The only game I was planning on picking up this Summer Sale was The Last of Us now that it appears to be (mostly?) fixed. But it wasn’t on sale. So I didn’t. Instead, I decided to give Forspoken a spin. I did like the demo I played earlier this year, so despite the somewhat mixed reviews I thought I’d try it for myself.

I also picked up Hi-Fi Rush, a game that came out of nowhere and took everyone by surprise. And that’s all, folks. I’d normally pick up 4-5 titles in a sale like this but with Starfield and the Cyberpunk DLC looming on the horizon, I didn’t want to add too much more to my backlog. In fact, I ideally want to clear the backlog before I get stuck into those games.

Now Playing: Tears of the Kingdom

I stopped playing Tears of the Kingdom with about 120 hours on the clock. I say stopped, rather than finished, because I could have probably played for 200 hours and still not seen or done absolutely everything. Can a game be too big? I guess it’s a pointless argument to be made about a game like TOTK because like BOTW before it, this is a game where how much or how little of the content you engage with is entirely up to you.

Like BOTW, once you leave the initial tutorial area you’re free to run directly to the final boss and finish the game. I obviously didn’t do that. What I did do over my 120 hours of play was complete all of the main quests, cleared all 152 shrines (and all of the shrine related quests), completed about 62 of the 70 or so side adventures, and about 70 of the 130 or so side quests. I only found about 120 of the 1000 (?) korok seeds, but that was enough to increase my inventory to the size I needed so I wasn’t too fussed about hunting more down.

I fully explored the sky and the land, but probably only 40% or so of the depths for reasons I’ll get into later. TOTK is a game absolutely stuffed with content. I’d say it feels three times the size of BOTW. And the kind of incredible thing is that no matter what I was doing, it always felt worth my time. I can certainly say that some of the ‘rewards’ you receive for some of the more elaborate side quests are a little disappointing, but I still enjoyed doing them.

TOTK is a direct sequel to BOTW and that’s one of the aspects that I loved the most about it. I’ve seen some people disappointed that the game uses the same world map but for me, that’s actually a positive. I loved returning to a familiar world and familiar locations to see what had changed. And a lot has changed. I loved meeting up with characters from BOTW and seeing that they were now doing. A continuation like this of story, world and characters isn’t something we’ve typically seen in this series before and TOTK does a fantastic job of building upon the world of BOTW whilst also giving us something new.

The new abilities give you more freedom than ever in terms of how you fight, solve puzzles and traverse the world. Perhaps too much freedom given how easy it is to cheese your way through the puzzle shrines – one of the reasons why I’d have to say they’re not, overall, quite as good as those in BOTW. The ability to construct vehicles and all kinds of crazy contraptions is exceptionally impressive even if none of them are strictly necessary. Once again, it’s really up to you how much or little you want to engage with these systems.

The main quest, like in BOTW, takes you to the four diverse regions of Hyrule where you’ll find a unique Temple. These are, I would say, much better than the Divine Beasts of BOTW. They’re still not quite like a more traditional Zelda dungeon, but they strike a closer balance. They all offer a unique location, style, puzzles and boss. The story beats may feel a little repetitive as you go – because which Temples you do and the order in which you do them is entirely up to you, so the game has to structure itself and the story to allow for that.

And the story does strike a lot of the same beats as BOTW which I would say is both a good and a bad thing. Good, in the sense that it does allow this massive degree of freedom in terms of how you choose to progress, but bad in the sense of the aforementioned repetition of information (DEMON KING? SECRET STONE?) and predictability. I did enjoy it though, and the game does build to a suitably exciting conclusion and final boss fight. Better than BOTW? Overall, I would say yes.

The new sky islands are pretty fun but there’s not a great deal of variation between them. Travelling from one to another on your own custom built flying machine never gets old though. The sense of scale is truly impressive, particularly when you take a flying leap all the way from the sky, down through a chasm and into the murky depths below.

The depths is one of the strongest and weakest new aspects of TOTK. When you have an objective – a target – it’s great. But outside of those main or side quests that carry you through it, I didn’t feel particularly incentivised to keep exploring. There are no shrines. No koroks. Little in the way of unique enemies. Little to no terrain variation or landmarks which means navigation can be a pain.

As I said, when you’re progressing through it for a reason, it’s great, but I found just exploring the depths for the sake of exploring to not be very rewarding. Yes, there are lots of fun, unique and cool optional clothing items to find, but nothing that I would say is really worth collecting unless you want absolutely everything. Because you really don’t need any of it.

However, the way the depths, the land and sky connect is very clever – the shrines to the lightroots, the rivers above to the mountains below and, most importantly, the depths being the place where you’ll harvest the materials you’ll need to increase your battery capacity which then makes your exploration of the sky islands all the more easy.

TOTK is a game of systems built upon systems and all these systems connect in ways that kind of blows my mind. The fact that this all just . . . works, and works on a Switch is kind of nuts. The world, the physics, the Rewind ability – that alone would break most other games. And then we have Ascend. That’s even more crazy when you really stop to think about it.

And you’re free to use and combine all of these systems in incredibly creative or stupid ways but whatever you do, however you do it, it all just . . . works. If I was rating TOTK purely on the basis of its systems and mechanics it would be an easy 10/10. They’re f**king wizards.

I think I’ll wrap up this review here because I don’t really want to spoil anything about this game. It’s the kind of game that’s best experienced yourself, discovering things as you go. As a sequel to BOTW, TOTK is excellent. If you enjoyed that game then it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy this just as much if not more. I’d say I enjoyed it just about the same.

In some ways, it does feel a little too bloated compared to BOTW but once again, none of the content didn’t feel worth doing and it is all entirely optional. When you feel like you’ve done enough of any one thing, you can just stop. I loved returning to this world, seeing these characters again. The new abilities are all creative. The story, though somewhat predictable, is told well. The boss fights are all unique and fun.

TOTK isn’t quite the same revolution for the series that BOTW represented, more of an evolution. It’s familiar, but fresh. It looks lovely, and the fact it runs at all as well as it does on the Switch is an absolute miracle. It’s another easy contender for my GOTY. Not as strong, perhaps, as I was expecting, but a contender nonetheless. An easy recommendation, but you’ve probably already played it.

9/10

Gallery: Cereza and the Lost Demon