Entertainment

‘Forspoken’ Reviews: Two Warnings

Published

1 year ago

January 24, 2023

(CTN News) – Forspoken, Square Enix’s upcoming open-world action-adventure game, has received negative reviews, as my colleague Paul Tassi reports.

It has a Metacritic average of 68/100, which isn’t stellar, but at least some reviewers seem to have enjoyed the game, so who knows? Perhaps you will as well.

As a warning, I have two things to say:

Currently, only PS5 reviews are available.

Square Enix did not send PC review codes to critics, so there are no PC reviews available right now. For rather ominous reasons, only console players will get a taste of the game when it launches simultaneously on PC and PS5.

In spite of Forspoken’s high PC requirements, many PC players will have trouble running the game (or at least at decent settings). It is recommended that you use 24GB of RAM, although 16GB is the minimum requirement. For PC gaming, that’s 720p / 30 frames per second, which is pretty low (does anyone on PC Forspoken play at this resolution?)

There have been no reviews of the game’s PC performance, so I can only fear the negative. As of right now, I’m waiting for reviews from gamers to start rolling in when the game releases tonight (January 24th on PS5 and PC. Check out what else is coming out this month).

Secondly, I played the demo and it’s terrible.

I didn’t even finish the demo. We live too short a life. Forspoken took me about 20 or 30 minutes to decide. It’s awful. I dislike the following things:

Open worlds are bland and boring, and they look ugly. The graphics are shockingly last-generation for a game with so many demanding specs. Even if I didn’t know what this was and just saw some video, I’d think it’s a PS3 game.
Combat is dull and dreary. You have all these powers, but selecting them is a hassle. When you hit an enemy, you almost never feel like you’ve connected. It should be a game with constant crunchy hits. When you tear through enemies, it should feel satisfying, but it’s floaty and unsatisfying. After the third group of mooks, I became bored. By the tenth, I was just irritated.
I’ve never encountered anything as cringey in a video game in the last decade as the Forspoken dialogue between the main protagonist and her magic bracelet. This is really terrible writing, has poor line delivery, and it’s pretty Forspoken constant (but likely more because of the writing than the actors). It tries to be funny (I think?) but fails miserably. It would have to be changed to another language and played silently.

In less than half an hour, I had my mind made up. It’s a rough game. In addition to being uninteresting and unfun, it looks horrible as well. My only recommendation is the Forspoken music, which is quite dramatic and lovely and really wasted on such a lackluster release.

68/100 Metacritic score seems too high for this game, sorry to burst your bubble. Looking forward to the Dead Space remake is at least a plus!