Forspoken Review – IGN

Actual bonding apparently happens off-screen, and this story – which is mostly told through exposition dumps between large stretches of open-world exploration – felt fairly rushed across the 15 hours it took me to beat the campaign as a result. That means the snippy banter between Cuff and Frey come off as obnoxious rather than endearing. Frey is surprisingly vocal about her disdain for most of the tasks Forspoken asks you to complete, and Cuff constantly belittles her for no good reason in a manner that I think is supposed to come off as friendly ribbing but instead feels like awkwardly watching a couple argue at a dinner party. This dynamic never really changes, even as Frey slowly goes through the motions of her predictable hero’s journey, and it is always exhausting.

Forspoken is essentially split into two parts: talking to townsfolk and doing mundane side quests like feeding sheep or chasing cats in Cipal, and making your way to some specific point of interest on its absurdly large map to further the story. I don’t think the Cipal sections would have bothered me if conversations and cutscenes didn’t have such a stilted, strangely low-budget feel to them. The performances throughout can actually be quite good, even when the writing leans heavily into telling rather than showing – but none of it is ever very fun to listen to thanks to long, awkward pauses between lines and occasional crowd noise or background music that’s so loud it drowns out everything being said.

Between visits to Cipal, you’re generally given a target on your map and free rein to get as distracted as you’d like along the way. That involves sprinting across Athia’s rocky terrain using Frey’s magic parkour skills, flipping over obstacles and eventually using a grappling whip to swing long distances, and then beating the snot out of enemies at various points of interest for new equipment and other rewards. This is what you’ll be doing for the vast majority of your time with Forspoken, and it can be a lot of fun even if those systems never get too deep.

Frey gains four styles of elemental magic over the course of the campaign, each essentially a different weapon you can quickly swap between with its own set of alternate fire modes and unlockable support skills – all of which can then be modestly upgraded as you play. Her starting magic is basically an earth-based gun that can be fired rapidly or charged for an area-of-effect burst, with skills that root enemies to the ground, up your defense temporarily, and more. You don’t even have a melee attack until you unlock the fire-based sword option about a third of the way through the campaign, which was a little annoyingly restrictive at first.

But once you do open up more of Frey’s capabilities, Forspoken’s particle effect-filled combat becomes quite amusing. Enemy variety isn’t exactly impressive (special larger baddies in particular can be really cool the first time you fight them, but less so by the third), but elemental resistances and unique quirks pushed me to swap weapons and strategies frequently mid-fight in a way I really enjoyed. For example, I loved that shielded enemies could be dealt with either by getting behind them or by charging an AOE shot and then firing it at the ground nearby to knock them off their guard. One-on-one fights can devolve into locking onto your target and holding down the trigger while you strafe out of harm’s way with Forspoken’s extremely generous dodge system, but the group encounters often did a good job of keeping me on my toes.

Similarly, the parkour system is a mix of straightforward and flashy, sending you nimbly soaring across the environment by simply holding down the Circle button and pointing yourself in a given direction. Just like your attacks, this becomes a lot more fun once you unlock some cooler skills, like options that boost your speed with well-timed button presses. That said, it is also far more mindless than combat, requiring very little nuance even as additional techniques become available to you and rarely ever testing your mastery of those moves with difficult platforming challenges. Even still, it can be quite a satisfying way to fancifully flow from task to task without much thought.

That’s a good thing, too, because there is a considerable amount of ground to cover in Athia, and very little of it is worth stopping to admire. This world is huge, and the campaign doesn’t even send you near half of it. The map is littered with optional side objective markers, but there isn’t much reason to go too far off the beaten path to complete them when the same small handful of tasks are repeated ad nauseam no matter where they are placed. They almost all boil down to either fighting some random dudes to earn a reward or just being handed one outright, and the payoffs don’t feel particularly necessary unless you decide to up the difficulty to Hard. Plenty of open-world games follow a similar structure, but Forspoken does it with such a barebones transparency that Athia comes off less like a world for you to explore and more like a repetitive checklist asking to be crossed off.