Forspoken Reviews
If you really want to play it, maybe just throw on a podcast and mess around with the magic.
The few glimmers of brilliance in Forspoken are overshadowed by an abundance of problems that are hard to overlook. A horribly written story is accentuated by a morally disengaged protagonist; an empty open-world with the usual checkbox of meaningless busywork gives no incentive to explore; while the magic system sports lots of control and options but very little reason to deviate from spamming the same moves. This is a game in desperate need of another year in development rather than the bland-fest we're served up. Forspoken? More like For-shame.
At this point you could make it a true Daily Double and just guess your way to the game's eventual kick off point, and you'd probably pull ahead of all the other contestants.
Where Forspoken should've been a striking and appealing fresh start for Luminous Productions, the end result sadly is a game not only bland and unpolished, but deprived of a reason to care for its unfolding mystery.
Forspoken is a bland experience about a girl and her cuff trying to save a world blanketed in corrupting mists. It tries to do a lot of things but doesn't ever really do any one thing well.
This could have been a great fish-out-of-water experience, but it's let down by patronising explanations and clunky gameplay.
Forspoken has a good foundation, but is a mess in execution due to a horrible protaganist, dull combat and technical problems. While there is enough to do in this pretty-looking open world it amounts to very little and so does the story.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Overall, there is very little in Forspoken worth mentioning. Seemingly a product without any clear direction and with any and every idea allowed to be added, Forspoken is a muddled, boring, toneless mess.
Forspoken is a game with fantastic potential, but it suffers from many problems. To unlock its full potential, you need to get used to the game's pace and start enjoying the great feeling of speed, but if you play slowly, you'll soon break the game.
Review in Czech | Read full review
The different elements of gameplay, such as combat, exploration, movement, and the map, are constantly at war with each other, forming the result of a mediocre and scrappy salad.
Review in Greek | Read full review
Luminous Productions has quite a way to go to captivate people from the start. A shame, because there’s a lot of potential buried within Forspoken’s flaws.
I really wanted to like Forspoken. However, its obnoxious protagonist, generic story, visually unappealing and uninteresting world, and shallow gameplay make it nothing more than an average experience that I’m in no rush to revisit.
I came into Forspoken unsure of what I would find. Its initial teasers promised a gorgeous magical world full of incredible sites. Instead, we’ve been given something boring, that runs terribly and has a story full of overused tropes. The combat fares no better, and it’s retailing for $70 at launch. Do yourself a favor and only sate your curiosities once this game is on a deep sale.
Frey may “do magic” and “kill jacked-up beasts,” but she can’t overcome the mediocrity that surrounds her and spills out of her mouth at nearly every turn.
Forspoken is a massive open world game, and that's its biggest problem. It's unnecessarily big and there is not enough content and things to do to make up for this huge world, and even though the combat system, spell mechanisms and parkour gameplay are mostly solid, the final product feels shallow and unsatisfying.
Review in Persian | Read full review
Forspoken would be a passable PlayStation title if it were released a decade ago, but it drops the ball as a contemporary AAA game due to its awkward voice performances, muddy visuals, and many bizarre design choices.
Square Enix did the right thing by investing in an entirely new franchise. But in the end, Forspoken is a huge disappointement with too many flaws to be a good game. A bland open world with forgets to shape its own identity, a poor writing and too many weakness from a technical point of view, coexist with some good gameplay mechanics like the spells and the parkour.
Review in French | Read full review
In all the ways “open world” could be used as a pejorative, Forspoken excels.
I’ll come back here and rate the game once I’ve finished the last chapter. However, I’m not convinced that it’s going to become any more magical and entertaining than it is now. It’s a shame, because the game starts from a good place: A new fantasy IP with a take-no-prisoners female protagonist. And I can tell that a lot of the people who worked on the game were sincerely trying. But I can also tell that several others very much were not.