Athia is beautiful when playing in both Quality or Performance mode, with stark rock formations serving as intimidating backdrops to various biomes and landscapes, from deserts to open fields to mountains that seem to be falling apart.Įxploring those areas is a lot of fun too. Still, players will discover a delightful open-world romp once the game opens up several hours in. The narrative segments of Forspoken, which often take place in the city of Cipal, don’t do much to highlight the game’s biggest strengths: its combat and exploration. Sadly, I usually wanted to jump through the rabbit hole to return to the fun, open-world gameplay in those moments.
Forspoken review movie#
While movie actors making the jump to video games often comes with mixed results, Ella’s passion for Frey comes through in some of the game’s extended monologues, even when they’re full of jargon. Thankfully, the narrative shortcomings are backed up by a strong performance from Ella Balinska. Instead, fun stretches of action are distributed between lengthy narrative-focused spurts, leaving a disconnect between the two. But it never goes through the effort to fuse story and gameplay together that well. A narrative twist near the end also adds some intriguing depth to the adventure, making me want to see the game through. Forspoken never feels like it’s in a rush to do that, instead making this new IP feel more overwhelming than inviting. Successful open-world games like Elden Ring understand that the faster you get players into the sandbox, the better. With a frontloaded story and controls that take a bit of practice to get used to, Forspoken’s earliest hours are its worst. The first several hours of this 20-hour adventure are mainly narrative-focused, deemphasizing gameplay and frontloading the experience with lots of character backstories, lore, and jargon that doesn’t make a lot of sense the first time you hear it. The plot that is there isn’t gracefully delivered either.
But Forspoken isn’t very interested in engaging with those ideas as anything more than backstory and narrative window dressing (Frey has a loaded history, complete with an arrest record, but it’s little more than an early game readable). It’s heartening to see a non-white protagonist in a major video game, and Luminous does try to pair that with a racial allegory about a character who feels belittled and out of place in Athia at first. Unfortunately, this story never fully comes together for a few reasons. It’s fun to see Japanese-style AAA game sensibilities, not unlike the ones you’d find in developer Luminous Productions’ Final Fantasy XV, applied to a thoroughly Western fantasy world. The narrative’s broad strokes generally work, as it has fun showing players its world through the eyes of a woman who constantly refuses the call to adventure and critiques RPG tropes that we typically overlook, like its protagonists murdering people for personal gain. Initially, Frey doesn’t want to deal with any of this and only wants to find her way back to New York, but she is pulled into an adventure to save the world by Cuff and other friends she makes in Athia.įun stretches of action are distributed between lengthy narrative-focused spurts, leaving a disconnect between the two. Soon, Frey discovers that a deadly force called the Break is plaguing Athia after the Tantas, the four ruling women of this world, went insane. She wakes up with a sarcastic magic cuff strapped to her arm that helps guide her. Narrative disconnectįorspoken follows Alfrey Holland, who goes by Frey, a troubled 21-year-old orphan whisked away to a magical world called Athia (Alice in Wonderland-style) on Christmas Day. Those flaws hold it back from becoming the next great open-world game, but fantasy fans should find plenty to enjoy as they dash through a vast world as a powerful sorceress. Long-winded story interludes also fail to emphasize what the game does best. Forspoken’s story is much less consistent, though, with an excellent lead performance and notable twists that are sullied by poor pacing and delivery.įorspoken is magical when focusing on its strengths, but it’ll take some crawling to get through a slow opening. Once players have some time to get comfortable with the controls, running around the vast and well-designed open world of Athia is equally adventurous and exhilarating, with combat acting as a visual spectacle that rewards mastery of its systems.
Forspoken is the first major AAA release of the year and the latest PlayStation 5 console exclusive, so all eyes are on it to deliver.
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