There’s no sign of the Forspoken media barrage slowing, with Square Enix and Sony unrelenting with their promotion of the release ahead of its 24th January launch. This video, anchored by Frey actress Ella Balinska, is not shy on spoilers, so if you’ve already decided to pick up the title and want to go in fresh – well, maybe give the video a miss and stop reading here.
For the rest of you, the showcase includes an epic battle with villain Tanta Sila, as well as a look at some of the Breakbeasts you’ll be fighting all over the open world of Athia. As is always the case with this game, the combat looks spot-on – it’s almost like a spiritual successor to the inFAMOUS franchise, and with Sucker Punch’s attention elsewhere, that’s no bad thing.
The video concludes with a look at an illusory New York that Frey will find herself trapped in, and have to fight her way out of. It’s all looking rock solid, but don’t take our word for it: there’s a demo on the PS Store right now. Have you checked it out yet? And what are your impressions thus far? As always, let us know in the comments section below.
[source blog.playstation.com]
Comments 37
Day one buy for me after trying out the demo.
I've been playing the demo. So far it pretty much what I wanted it to be. The traversal is fun, the combat is satisfying and it looks great. The dialog sucks but I have a pretty high tolerance for that.
My main sticking point is with the controls. Holding down circle to parkour isn't great and square for the tether doesn't feel good either. Hopefully they can put in some different control schemes because otherwise I'm sold.
I thought the Demo was a bit of a mixed bag after completing nearly everything offered (which is substantial by the way for a demo). The combat is great, and super unique with its control scheme. I am glad the gear actually has attributes, I was worried it would be only cosmetic, which i hate (heres looking at you GOT, Jedi Fallen Order, etc).
The dialogue between Frey and her magical bangle is god awful and feels out of place and delivered especially poorly as if they were recorded in two different studios and soundstage setups lol. The banter itself is annoying, repetitive, and shallow. She throws out profanity in ways that it seems forced.
The story beats I suspect will fare better than these shallow bits of traversal banter, as the above video shows. I get they had to mesh a girl from modern times with a fantasy world, but it does feel jarring in the way it blends in terms of dialogue between Frey and the protagonists of the fantasy world. This could have been rectified had Frey been a little less shallow with her speech. The HUD UI is too small and angled weird almost wall eye vision like which could use some better tuning because the actual UI interface is decent and well-designed but also plagued by this weird bending wall eye edging.
The map UI map is awesome and can be zoomed out to an over world view and zoomed in to a top-down view and even further to a 3D isometric view with topographical elevation like elements. The game world is a decent size with what I suspect are 4 or 5 different biomes.
Aside from that though combat and traversal are great, and the open world is far from empty, with tons of side activities, enemies and corrupted creatures to tackle or not, mini bosses to fight, and loot to find and points of interest to visit. Overall, the game was a blast to play despite the terrible traversal banter. The dialogue is nowhere as bad as nearly every JRPG to release as of late.
I am definitely keeping this on the radar, but hesitant on a pre order only because of a worry about repetition in enemies and side content. Definitely looking forward to this over much of the overhyped games on the horizon like dead space, potter fans service and the next slew of remasters/remakes. As an original IP, story, and world with this fun magical combat, it's refreshing.
PSA: Pro tip, the game tells you you have to hold R1 and I think L1 to switch the magical Style; but actually you can quick swap between the two you have most recently switched between by just hitting right on the d-pad it makes the combat so much more fluid switching between the two styles that are available in the demo.
The more I see of this game the more my hopes for it go up.
@Enuo Agreed on some of the finicky traversal controls, the parkour, jump, and tether buttons all felt cumbersome to use in combination. Hopefully they can be remapped. I forgot to check if that possible in the demo. I would switch the parkour to square and the tether to circle.
I can’t get over how much she looks like Lorraine Pascal. It’s like playing an RPG as Nigella, I love it.
@Enuo every SE game has terrible dialogue.
but at this point its part of their charm
@Bentleyma
Really!? Now I gotta try it...
After playing the demo don't see anything really special about the game to justify $70 day one!! I might get the game when it drops in price!
After trying the demo, I dont see a game here worth $70, it is too simple and depth behind the powers feel like its going to get old quick.
The demo pretty much solidified what my impressions were from the videos we’ve seen. Cringy dialogue, gigantic bland open world and flashy combat.
If they would have mapped spells to L1/2+face buttons or R1/2 it would be significantly better. Bringing up the wheel slows things down and feels dated.
I tried the demo and while it has peaked my interest from nothing to interested. There are a lot of issues in the demo that keep me from buying it.
Notably: Manually dodging feels horrible and automatically dodging feels unsatisfying. The team really seriously needs to work on this mechanic rather than just adding an auto dodge feature. It feels too flashy which makes it impossible to tell when you're safe and when Frey is just doing a flashy animation where she is still going to get hit.
The UI is awful. It looks really bad. Yellow text is an awful awful horrible idea. It's grating on the eyes, and much too stylized. My opinion of course, but I hate it.
The demo is just really bad. It defaults to easy mode so if you go through the demo without messing with settings you get a very sanitized experience. Change the difficulty to normal, and the many flaws start to show, like overly tanky enemies, enemies killing you in one or two hits for whatever reason, and Frey's damage being really inconsistent.
I don't really like the main character. She isn't interesting, the banter with the Cuff is repetitive and annoying (thankfully you can minimize it, but she might grow on me. So far, not really vibing with her at all.
The open world is dead, lifeless, and VERY boring. There is no one else to talk to, there is nothing to discover on your own, there is nothing to be surprised about, and it just feels like you run from place to place to sling magic and that's it.
It is a lot better than I thought.
Movement feels really good and looks cool.
Performance mode holds fairly steady.
Frey's and Sila's magic seem impactful (until you see the health bar), and are pretty fun to use.
The game seems to have a lot more depth than I thought. Seems like combat can be pretty enjoyable.
All in all...I'll wait for a sale. Early 2023 is already stacked, I have enough games to play already, and I don't want to spend 70 dollars for a game I'm likely to put down after a few days, not because I beat it, but because I'm bored of it.
Looks absolutely gorgeous and super polished. I’m still unsure if it’s a day one for me but I’ll be buying it at some point for sure. Big year for Square in 2023, glad that I finally started playing their games during the pandemic as I’m genuinely excited as a result.
I had such high hopes, but they’re all but gone after playing the demo. I thought the traversal would be fun, but it felt so boring. The combat was quite simplistic as well, but perhaps you need to play it a bit more to really understand the dynamics. The dialogues are the worst part, they could become really annoying if they won’t tone it down.
Overall certainly no day one buy for me anymore. Perhaps the reviews of the full game will shine a different light.
Appreciate the spoiler warning so I'll skip this video for now. I honestly don't understand why Square feels the need to spoil their games in their trailers near release. FF7R still blows me away how much they spoiled.
My only issue the world feels way to bright. Like to the point of being washed out. Some weird lighting go on and it isn't my 4K TV.
@nessisonett It's her daughter!
@get2sammyb To be fair, it would have been a hell of a random reference if I didn’t know she was her daughter 😂
Really suprised by how much I enjoyed the demo, played the whole thing and couldnt put it down. The combat is addictive and fun, whilst being a little silly too (this is absolutely the USP of the game). Its certainly a tangible graphical downgrade from the original vision shown in early trailers, which is a shame. Resolution and texture detail unsatisfyingly soft (caveated by the fact this is not the full release). The world is questionable yes, whilst fun to traverse and looks reasonably pleasing, it is very static, this is offset by the various activities you can sweep up across the map. The biggest question for me is, will this hold up over extended play, or will it feel like a certain French publishers copy and paste exercise. You didn't ask for a mini demo review but there it is
@nessisonett Oh I see what you mean!
I liked the demo, but the performance didn’t look very good.
I wish the ray tracing/quality mode didn’t have that much input lag. Maybe it will get better.
Demo was nice but it's confirmed me to not buy it cause of 2 reasons which is the terrible dialogue that I had to turn to 0. The devs trying to make Freya "relatable" by having her saying the f word in many of her sentences is so cringey and annoying. The second reason is the music, I do not like the music one bit.
I like the demo the game reminds of Infamous didn't have a problem with the dialogue it caught me by surprise how much she cuss and I like how the bracelet sounds using Sony 3D audio headsets
Tried the demo and it confirmed my suspisions, from the trailers they have released, that it's just not very good. And the graphics have been downgraded a huge amount from the announcement
So far really like the gameplay in the demo. Pre-order is a keeper.
Whatever remaining hype I had for the game is gone after playing the demo. Cringey dialogue, finicky lock-on, and boring enemies. I was actually surprised how bad the demo was. I don't know why they thought this would persuade people to buy the game. They would have been better off skipping the demo and going straight to release.
I can’t watch it because spoilers, but seriously this game can’t get here soon enough! So excited!
I really like the combat. But the rest almost feels like a Ubisoft open world game. Also my god, the main character needs to STOP talking none-stop, and swearing. The swearing feels so out of character and unnecessary.
God she is so pretty to me. I didn't need to see anymore of this to know i was gonna buy it but now I might preoreder.
I played the whole demo and while I certainly can’t deny the combat and traversal was fun in that very lizard Brain sort of way, the world was a bit of a letdown in more ways than one. Aside from the usual checklist open world format, it’s honestly worse than what Ubisoft puts out. It just seemed a bit slapped together without much thought to environmental design or storytelling. Also the one objective where it teleports you into a fort that’s like 100 feet away, says you went back in time and have to protect static character models from the zombie dudes for 3 minutes is straight out of a ps2 game. I was literally laughing that this was something squeenix decided to show in a demo.
Demo didn’t do much for me. Maybe pick it up down the road when it’s cheap but definitely not a day one purchase for me.
Wait, they hired a posh British woman to play a new yorker, lol. You couldn't find a mixed New Yorker to play a new yorker?
They should have just let her use her original accent it's much better anyway.
I caved and got the demo. I’m ready. Not too thrilled about the sentient bracelet guy but Frey is cool. Sorta has that NYC ennui going on because I would personally be freaking out if I got teledumped into a zombie and monster filled world. Even with magic.
I was really excited for this demo but it's not very good is it? I tried all the graphics settings from ray tracing to 120hz and they all don't feel right. The combat is awkward and the dialogue reminds me of "That wizard came from the moon"
If I were her I'd be distancing myself from this game as much as possible - she sees to do a good job of the script she's given, but the script is dire
@Nepp67
This. I'm no prude but the swearing is just totally unnecessary and I also turned the voices to 0. The rest of the dialogue is awful, and don't agree that this is in a good way like some of the other comments suggest. Feels completely disconnected and forced. Truly horrendous. The combat is satisfying though but UI overly complex and not explained well in the demo. One for a sale methinks.
Skipped the video and article! Looking forward to going into this game blind when January 24 rolls around.
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