Forspoken

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Forspoken review
Dan Lenois

Review

Forspoken should be forgotten

Aims low, lands lower.


Under the mire of Forspoken's many flaws, there is the individual fragments of what could have been a highly compelling, or at least passable, narrative. Forspoken follows the character of Frey, who grew up with no family, no prospects, and forced to rely on street gangs in order to scratch out a living. After facing the prospect of prison time for her criminal offenses, Frey instead has her sentence commuted by the judge, who gives her one final chance to set things right. However, things go wrong from that point on, and after a series of misadventures, Frey finds herself transported to a magical world, with no clear way home. Everything about Frey's origin story plaintively makes it clear that the player is expected to find her a sympathetic, or even relatable, character. The problem though is that this message definitely wasn't conveyed to whoever was in charge of writing the dialogue.

Through both the written dialogue and the voice acting performance, Frey has all the personal likeability of nails on a chalkboard. If you were hoping that, over time, the player might find themselves connecting more with Frey, you probably shouldn't get your hopes up. Similar to Outriders, Forspoken makes the critical mistake of assuming random out-of-context swearing and an abrasive attitude are the two sole factors in a protagonist's personality. And since the player will be hearing quite a bit from Frey over the course of the game, this is no minor issue to overlook.



An open world devoid of life...


The gameplay mechanics are fairly in line with what one would expect of any other open-world RPG. There are different zones, farmable resources, a variety of enemy types of varying difficulty for you to grind XP and resources from, and of course, story missions for you to progress through. But none of it feels particularly gripping. Even only a few hours in, it's easy to lose interest in what you're doing. This is helped, of course, by the fact that Forspoken's PC optimization is so bad that it comparatively makes Hogwarts Legacy look like a perfectly smooth experience.

Technical difficulties ahead...


For the purposes of this review, Forspoken was played on both a desktop and laptop, with both sharing high-end intel i7 processors. The desktop boasted a Nvidia 2070 GTX gpu, and the laptop featured a Nvidia 3070 RTX gpu. Despite the game advertising that it only required a minimum GPU requirement of a Nvidia 1060, with the Nvidia 3070 RTX being the recommended GPU for high-end performance, you can rest assured that even with the latter firmly in place, your PC will struggle to consistently maintain a stable minimum of 1080p 60fps. After running benchtests using a variety of option configurations, including enabling and disabling Vsync, it became clear that even if the player reduced all graphical settings to their minimum values, and ran a 3070 RTX, there was still no way of completely mitigating the frame drops, stutter, and other similar issues. The lack of file optimization here is likewise absurd. As if offering a retail asking price of $69.99 for this mess of a game wasn't absurd on its own, the fact that the game requires over 150 GBs of HDD space makes it even less desirable.

Final Thoughts:


Forspoken is not worth either your money, or your time. Even were it offered for free, perhaps as part of a free weekend promotion on Steam, or as one of the rotating weekly free game giveaways on the Epic Games Store, it would still be too high a price to pay, as the time investment costs far outweigh the doubtful pleasure of experiencing what little Forspoken has to offer.


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4.0

fun score

Pros

It frequently is so bad, it's almost good.

Cons

Awful optimization, cringeworthy dialogue, forgettable narrative, and mediocre gameplay