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By Rob Leane\n \t\t<\/p>
Published: Monday, 23 January 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>
On paper, the new PS5\/PC game Forspoken<\/a> sounds like quite a fun idea. The protagonist, Frey, is a modern New Yorker that gets \u2018vooshed\u2019 through a portal to the mystical land of Athia. The game drops a reference nice and early to Alice in Wonderland, and we wouldn\u2019t be surprised if The Wizard of Oz was another inspiration for Forspoken story\u2019s set-up.<\/p>\n Frey, voiced by Ella Balinska (who you might remember from the Charlie\u2019s Angels reboot or the Resident Evil Netflix series), is a streetwise orphan who is trying and failing to keep out of trouble with criminal gangs. She just wants to escape her humdrum life, but Athia is a lot more than she bargained for, as is the mystical cuff that she is bonded with early in the plot.<\/p>\n This piece of \u2018sassy bling\u2019 is voiced by Jonathan Cake (Rebecca, Empire, Desperate Housewives) and it imbues Frey with magical powers right near the start of your adventure. She was already a bigger parkour expert than Michael and Dwight from The Office, and now she can dish out magical attacks as well as travelling at superhuman speed through the open-world of Athia.<\/p>\n As we said up top, it\u2019s a fun little idea to kick off a game with, but we wouldn\u2019t say that Forspoken nails much of what it\u2019s going for. We don\u2019t hate that set-up, but we don\u2019t love what it leads to either. The game has a visually-impressive open world, for example, but it regularly pulls you out of it for stilted cut scenes and forced conversations that you can\u2019t even look around during. It\u2019s very stop-and-start, especially in the crucial opening hours.<\/p>\n The game also has a strong array of magical attacks that come in very handy during combat, but the control scheme dictates that you basically have to spam L2 and R2 in every battle \u2014 whilst constantly pressing circle to dodge \u2014 which doesn\u2019t exactly create the feeling that you\u2019re a master of the mystic arts. It\u2019s more like you\u2019re just mashing buttons and hoping for the best, which doesn\u2019t make you look forward to the next battle.<\/p>\n This is a shame, because it does feel like a lot of time and effort has been put into designing your enemies, which often feel like the deranged sort of monsters and messed-up mortals that you\u2019d expect to find in a FromSoftware game like Elden Ring. While those games make you feel like a legend, however, this one makes you feel like you\u2019re constantly winging it and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t some enjoyable moments that are closely tied to combat, though. There are some subterranean dungeon-like levels, where you must face room after room of opponents (in exchange for some decent loot), which feel like they could become fan-favourite sections of the game.<\/p> As fans feared from the much-maligned marketing materials (see below), the game\u2019s dialogue also leaves quite a lot to be desired, with the script being absolutely drenched in the damp sort of \u2018comedic\u2019 dialogue that has become increasingly common in games (and movies and TV shows) in the years since Joss Whedon first assembled the Avengers. \u201cWell,\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>just happened\u201d is the sort of cringe-inducing, cliched line that would feel right at home in Forspoken.<\/p>\n Perhaps we\u2019re being overly harsh, though. Although the dialogue is corny in terms of its content, you can really tell that the actors are trying their best to sell it, to make it sound like it\u2019s coming from a place of honesty within the characters. (You could also argue that some of the humour got lost in translation, with developers Luminous Productions based in Japan.)<\/p>\n Frey is a motormouth New Yorker and her Cuff companion (who prefers to be called a \u2018Vambrace\u2019) is a sarcastic Brit, and somehow you do believe that these are the sort of conversations they would have. Hats off to Balinska and Cake for committing to the bit. Certainly, their characters are more bearable than they seemed when the trailer below first dropped and Twitter tore it to shreds.<\/p>\n A beautiful and cruel new land? Twisted monsters? An array of magical abilities? Sentient jewellery!? Latest deals<\/h5>