Review: Forspoken

New IP’s are tough to pull off these days. People say they want the new stuff, some new world to explore and story to be immersed in but unless the gameplay is absolutely perfect from the off and the hype train is storming along then people simply won’t buy that new IP, causing developers and publishers to fall back on tried and tested franchises. 

Enter Forspoken, Luminous Productions and Square Enix’s latest action RPG. It fell into this exact trap, but it is my belief that the game hasn’t been given it’s due credit as, while I admit it's not all perfect, once you get a few hours into the game and get the flow of things you will be treated to a cool world to explore with some interesting story/lore concepts and a battle system that provides some of the best attack animations outside of a Final Fantasy game. 

Forspoken begins in modern day New York, our protagonist, Alfre ‘Frey’ Holland is trying to look after herself and her cat while dodging local gang’s and the police. We find that Frey has a mysterious past having been orphaned as a baby and abandoned. After an encounter with said gang results in her home being burnt down, Frey goes on the run and eventually finds a magical amulet called Cuff and is thrown into a portal to appear in a world called Athia. 

It turns out that Cuff is sentient and talks to Frey via a psychic connection they share. Cuff is also very useful, granting her magical powers, both for battle and for traversing the world of Athia. That open world is massive and contains a lot of stuff to discover. Regular readers will know my disdain for open world games with too many icons on the map and while Forspoken does fall into this trap, it marks those icons with the rewards you get for completing them, be that mana, new gear or one of the various other collectibles.  

So I am a little torn on this subject, as on one hand Forspoken does fall into the checklist trap, but it never felt like a chore. A major reason for this is something that other open world games should implement, which is being able to add more than one way point to the map. You can have up to five going at any given time, as well as the one for your main story objective. It allows you to plan a path towards that objective while also picking up major upgrades along the way. It’s a genius idea that, at least for me, stopped the icons becoming a chore you have to do. 

It promotes exploration and, since the items you need to increase your magical abilities and upgrade your gear are just strewn about the world, you can get plenty for upgrades without having to grind out battles over and over again. Those items include glowing orbs of Mana, which is an interesting way to handle that age old mechanic and I really like it as currency rather than a meter that drops down to power your abilities and most powerful attacks. To be clear, you still have a meter to govern that, but it's stamina. It’s a little twist on the same formula, but keeps things that little bit fresher. 

As you travel around you discover that there is only one city left on Athia, Cipal, and everything else has been destroyed by ‘The Break’ as Frey dubs it. This is a miasma that corrupts creatures caught in it, causing them to become grotesque and powerful monsters with exposed bones and, for some reason, gold covering sections of their bodies. This fate awaits creatures ranging from bears to deer to crocodiles, and of course, the humans unfortunate enough to escape. 

The humans are just zombie mobs that prove, especially with the later powers, trivial to defeat, but some of the bigger creatures are no joke and can come at you with large groups. Each creature also has a weakness to a specific type of magic that Frey can use based on four elements: Earth, Fire, Water and Lightning. Switching between each magic type is easy and paying attention to what weakness a given enemy has is crucial to success. This can easily be found by performing a ‘Cuff Scan’ which reveals more information about the creature in question, as well as revealing collectibles and resources. 

The cuff scan becomes vital as some of the upgrade resources are really hard to see, because they don’t glow or anything like that. As you get close you do get a little, and I mean a little, icon on them to say where they are, but when using her magical parkour abilities Frey travels so fast that it can be difficult to spot them. This is especially as a lot of them are flowers that just blend into grassy areas. It adds to the overall look, but can be maddening when trying to farm for upgrades. 

The aforementioned magical parkour is a true gem of the game. While it can be a little hard to control in spots and you can easily overshoot things you are aiming for, the sense of speed is immense and charging across the landscape, flipping and bouncing over obstacles is an absolute blast. It again means that finding all those icons isn’t as much of a chore as it would be in other games and is a stand out mechanic. 

I mentioned previously that Frey has access to four types of magic. While one of those, and the first one  you get, is all Frey’s, the others are acquired by defeating the god like Tanta’s, beings of power that used to benevolently rule Athia, but now are part of its downfall. This concept is super cool and one of my favorite story aspects of the game, though the remaining tale falls pretty epically into “I can see where this is going a mile away” territory not long after you reach the magical land. It’s a shame that overall the story is pretty generic as there are some really cool concepts and lore dotted over the world, but I guess we can’t have it all and frankly, the game play’s so well you can easily ignore the story, though it does take quite a turn at one point that makes it worth it. 

Some of the magic attacks available to Frey are some of the coolest animations of any game in recent years. For example, one water based attack engulfs an enemy in a ball of swirling water and when you attack it, the ball explodes and damages everything around it. It looks awesome, and gives fights a spectacle only matched by using the summons in Final Fantasy. The basic magical attacks are just that, but with three levels and multiple options allow you to play around in combat. The biggest attacks are secondary magic, but even bigger than that is the surge magic, screen filling powers that at their fullest power destroy everything in their path in one hit, though I admit that does depend on exactly what you are fighting at the time. 

Charging up a barrier of molten rock to raise from the ground to hit anything Frey is facing is deeply satisfying and while not all of the abilities are particularly useful, and trust me, there are so many that there are more of those than you would really want, battles are fast and exciting. Fluidly dodging attacks while switching to attack magic before unleashing a powerful secondary attack before finishing a group of enemies off with a surge attack just feels great, and rarely gets old. 

Ultimately the biggest problem with Forspoken is the writing. As I said previously the story is as predictable as they come, which is disappointing but not the real problem. The worst sin is that when Frey is talking, while a fine performance from the actor, the dialog is just dire. I don’t mind swearing in games, or any medium save for content made for kids, but the way Frey talks borders on the unbelievable. I have seen things floating about the internet saying that if this is how the developers think New Yorkers talk they are very much mistaken. 

It can get grating when you play a game for forty odd hours, and this is compounded by the fact that certain actions have exactly one set of dialog. I get that the more sound you record with an actor makes the costs of a game go up, but hearing the exact same thing every time you interact with a certain object, and there being multiple objects of the same type around the world, gets very annoying very quickly. I almost would have preferred it to say the thing once, then never have a voice line again after that first one. To be fair, that does happen to some stuff, just not everything. 

Honestly though, go into Forspoken for the gameplay and you will be greatly rewarded with a fast paced beautiful game with satisfying combat and enough abilities to really play around in fights. You will probably take or leave the story, but don’t give in to the rumors, it’s actually a pretty great game, you just have to give it a chance. 

Review: The Outer Worlds

It is easy to tell a Japanese RPG from a Western one. JRPG’s focus on cool visuals, heavily inspired from anime and manga with at times cheesy dialog and story lines and combat that features summoning monsters and comically over sized swords. Western RPG’s, generally speaking, focus on the dialog and story, presenting worlds that seem to brim with possibilities. Obsidian Entertainments The Outer Worlds is very much the second of these, and in some ways is an excellent example, but not so much in others. 

You play as the sole revived occupant of ‘The Hope’, a colony ship left on the edge of  the Halcyon colony, light years from earth. The man that revived you says he can save the thousands of other colonists on the ship if you help him, and of course you do, setting you forth on an adventure across space stations and worlds to encounter a cast of crazy characters, strange planets and vicious monsters. So far, so RPG. 

To solidify this, there are stats, upgradable weapons, companions and quests. Everything you would want from an RPG, except for one important thing: Stakes. The stakes here never feel world ending, there isn’t some ‘big bad’ coming to destroy you, it is a smaller tale than that, which is a deliberate design choice but one that makes everything feel a little bit muted and understated. 

There is a sense of humor to The Outer Worlds that a lot of RPG’s lack, and this comes through in the excellent writing and story lines. The tale of corporations running everything and the rivalry between each one that leads employees to not even take medicine if it isn’t made by the one they work for is something genuinely different and fun, with people you encounter saying the company marketing line at the end of every sentence. It can get a little tedious, but that is kind of the point, corporate policy infringing on everything in your life is just that. 

You start out a loner, but soon come upon your first companion, Pravati, an engineer naive in the way of the colony. This is where the game really comes into its own, showcasing the excellent, nuanced writing that is truly the hallmark of The Outer Worlds. Each companion is a very unique character you help shape over the course of the story, and the both satisfying and disappointing ending wrap up scenes serve as a nice conclusion to each arc, though that does depend on how much of each character's quest line you complete. 

The game is a bit Mass Effect 2 in that regard, with each character coming with a ‘loyalty mission’ style quest line that gives back story and develops each one into those unique characters. The best part is that they aren’t ‘go to this place, fight a bunch of creatures/bad guys and win’. A couple are, but most are helping these characters find closure on an aspect of their lives or giving advice in times or need. 

Of course, you do have the option to be a massive dick. This being a story and character heavy RPG you get the option to be good, bad or somewhere in between, and characters do change to reflect that. Being the person I am, good was my path through the game and I saw plenty to give me a satisfying conclusion. It’s all this that will make or break the game for you in the end, if you find the dialog grating or cheesy, and hate the voice acting, cause everyone is then this won’t be the game for you. It’s not, but that's just my opinion, the voice acting is pretty great throughout, though most people have a southern american accent that isn’t for everyone. The writing as previously stated is excellent and these feel like real people, it's truly impressive. 

What's not impressive however, is the combat. It’s in there, it works, but it's just all so lackluster. The guns have little weight to them and on most encounters are so very easy they are a bump in the road rather than an obstacle to overcome. To put into perspective about how easy these encounters are, each companion comes with a unique combat ability, as well as things that boost your stats in certain ways but the fights being as easy as they were I didn’t have to use these abilities. In fact I actively forgot about them until about two hours from the end of the game. 

The ability to assign different states to your companions doesn’t help with this either, since setting them to aggressive and giving them decent weapons and armour means they will just wade in and wreck anything they see, though this does normally result in at least one dying. On the plus side, as soon as all the enemies have been dealt with they instantly revive, so it's no big deal. 

All that was required was the guns to feel that little bit more weighty, like actual armaments, and the enemies to be harder to kill, just by a little bit and that would have given a better performance out of the combat. As it stands, if it wasn’t there at all you wouldn’t lose that much when playing, which is a shame because effort has been made here, with a variety of weapons both ranged and melee that give you plenty of options, it just all feels kind of pointless. 

Travelling about the halcyon colony grants you areas that include a space station, cities and small towns on a few different planets. It's a bummer that there isn’t more of this as the stellar map has several planets you can’t seem to go to, though to be fair I didn’t find all the companions during my play through so that could have changed, as well as the fact I played as a good guy so the options could have changed. The environments I traveled to were pretty varied and very nice looking, so monotony didn’t set in until the back travelling kicked in towards the end of the game. 

The Outer Worlds is a great RPG that just needs better combat. The writing, characters, environments and tone provide a unique setting that is entertaining to explore. There are ideas around what characters in a game of this type could be and prove successful and satisfying, and despite the ending scroll being disappointing for its lack of animation it gives you closure to a character set you come to love, especially for your player character.

 If you are itching for a RPG that doesn’t have all the over top weapons and summons of a JRPG then this is the game for you, and it isn’t over a hundred hours to play, so it doesn’t out stay its welcome. As western RPG’s go, this is a great one.

Review: Saturday Morning RPG

Sometimes you come across a game that just misses the point. Either in its execution of systems, attempt to ape a bigger game, or the purpose of a given story type. Saturday Morning RPG is such a game, and while it has some entertaining stuff and a distinct sense of humor, those points it misses are too glaring to ignore.

The setup is simple, you play a guy who likes 80’s Saturday morning cartoons. If you’re of a certain age, think things like G.I.Joe, Transformers etc. You play as Marty, who is given a magic notebook that grants him the ability to fight using various objects as weapons, as well as his fists. This being an RPG, fighting is the primary mechanic of the game, the problem is, it sucks.

Most RPG’s, especially turn based ones, gradually ramp up your abilities and weapons as the game progresses, giving you the capability to take on ever more difficult foes while also selecting buffs and power ups from a menu. Those power ups might be a higher form of armour to increase your health, a fire imbued sword or a potion that grants a temporary bonus.

Here, those bonuses are granted via scratch stickers, obtained as you play. When you engage in a combat encounter, the first screen you are shown is the one containing all the stickers you currently have equipped, and you have a set time to scratch them before the games moves you into battle. When I say scratch, I mean it - you have to rub the Switches touch screen as fast as you can or move the left stick just as quick. You will never scratch all the ones equipped, and you will never find an upgrade that grants longer time on this screen.

This is compounded by the fact that each one comes with a scratch rating, so the better the sticker the longer it will take to scratch. It means that adding a decent modifier to your health might take up most of your time on the that screen, not allowing you to use any others, but then you can’t pick which ones you can scratch first, you place all the stickers you have, the screen pops up and it will just decide which one is the first one you can use, so any strategy that might come from careful use is thrown out of the window.

Once you get past the stickers, you are in proper combat, which is turn based. There is a series of icons at the top of the screen that shows you who goes next, and you have various options open to you. Marty has the ability to ‘charge up’, giving him a multiplier to his attacks. There are a few problems with this, most notably it screws you over.

The idea behind powering up at the start of a fight is sound, but it takes turns to do that and you only get so much of the stamina meter needed for it. To get a full x9.9 multiplier can take three of your turns, by which point enemies are already attacking you and in the late stages buffing and debuffing you. Sure you get to unleash that first attack at an elevated power, but with half your health gone, accuracy lowered, attack lowered with burn applied and the enemies with increased HP, increased accuracy and increased attack you might take out one of them max, even with a multi hit attack.

This doesn’t get better over the course of the game either, that same loop exists at the start as it does at the end, and can mean you have to restart basic encounters multiple times. If you had the ability to heal on a regular basis it would have worked better, but you don’t. There are items that grant healing, but it is a max of three uses and the only one I found as a 25% heal. It helped, but wasn’t the full heal that would have helped in the tougher encounters.

Things you pick up in the environment count as weapons, so there are some obvious ones that do not obvious attacks, like the sword that calls down a lightning strike, and some not so obvious ones. The pencil compass, care bear and straight up Optimus Prime are examples of the some of the crazier weapons, all the while ramming home that 80’s pop culture reverence that is the games bread and butter.

You can block attacks with a well timed button press, which also gains you back some meter to power up, but that isn’t telegraphed as much as needed and the amount gained back is minimal for most attempts as all but the most well timed blocks will grant any kind of decent restoration. Even then though, the block mitigates most damage not all, and if the turn order works out that the enemies have a bunch of turns stacked up (it's rarely 1v1) it can still cause you problems.

Missed points are most evident in the combat. You can find slightly more powerful weapons in the environment, but not without exploring every inch, gaining nothing but XP from winning fights. This is a creative choice and I get that, but RPG’s should provide a continual sense of getting better. Traditionally, this is due to a fairly steady rate of new weapons and gear, though recent years have seen it become getting to grips with controls and frame priority. Either way, you get better over time.

I never felt more powerful in Saturday Morning RPG. Even after several hours with the game, Marty was about as powerful as he was when I first started, and the weapons never became that “Ama gonna mess you up!” spectacle that the best the genre has to offer provides. It made the combat worse than boring - it was a slog.

Having said all that, there is a sense of humour to everything that makes it a light and airey affair, it's all dumb, with the types of baddies you found in fact find in cartoons back in the 80’s. From the Cobra Commander styled Commander Hood to the takes on various Transformers, it really does nail the 80’s nostalgia kick. I am just sad that the game wasn’t a better RPG, developers Mighty Rabbit Studios concentrated just a little too much on the style and nostalgia rather than nailing a quality, if short, RPG.

If the 80’s tinge tickles your fancy, there are certainly worse ways to spend your time, just don’t expect a game that delivers on power fantasy, that game could exist, but isn’t this. Instead you get a few hours of time wasting, but nothing that will stick with you.

Review: Golf Story

I do not do sports. A slightly sad statement, but most traditional sporting activities do not fall under my purview, and I especially don’t get the extreme fandom some people go to with it. Being British, this is especially true of Football, which, while fun to actually play on occasion, constantly baffles me.

An aspect of this bafflement has been sports video games, I mean if you want to play Ice Hockey or Football, just go actually play the sport. There is, however, a caveat to this: Golf. It is the one real world sport that seems to translate to the screen perfectly, with easy to understand mechanics and just a single player to contend with. I haven’t played a golf game in many years, but I remember always having a good time with them.

When Sidebar Games released Golf Story onto Switch, I picked it up as it seemed a  great take on the golf game. An RPG but you are a golfer? Sounds cool to me, and it is for the most part. The game has some issues, and a back quarter that is a serious slog, but the writing, graphics and depth of its version of the sport do makeup for a lot.

You start the game with your character leaving his wife. It sounds depressing, but she is pretty unsupportive and he needs to go and become a pro golfer to to fulfil a legacy to his now deceased father. It is a pretty simple setup, but it works, and from that point you travel to various locations and taken on challenges to get better and improve.

In many ways, it is a lot like what you might think of when the term RPG is used. The differences being that battles are now golfing challenges, which might be hit balls in a specific set of holes, or use only one type of shot to sink a ball, or get a ball into a certain area. Each golf course has its own challenges, both in terms of those and aspects of the terrain unique to that area.

For example, Lurker Valley, the second course, has tar pits and fossils that can affect your shots. It also has cavemen as other players and course officials. To say Golf Story doesn’t take itself too serious is an understatement, it is goofy and fun in all the right places, and this gives a unique twist to each new course.

The representation of the sport actually does have a lot of depth, as there are various shot types and clubs to choose from, and have to take into account things like ball bounce, wind speed and direction and green slope. It makes for a lot to take on board and learn, but the game does a bad job of telling you about these things, and I kept forgetting I could curve balls and all sorts of other things that would help with the most difficult holes.

There is an overworld you navigate with the odd secret as you travel to each course, each course has its own visual style and characters, and with each successful challenge you earn XP to upgrade your stats and become a better golfer.

Unfortunately, this is where the game starts to break down. It at no point explains what the stats really do, and how they affect your game. Most RPG’s stats are relatively obvious, with things like ‘Damage’ meaning you hit harder, and ‘stamina’ meaning you can do things for longer. Golf Story’s stats are: Power, Purity, Strike, Ability and Spin. A couple of those, like Power and Spin, are fairly self explanatory: add more points to Power to hit harder, but the rest are confusing, to say the least.

This is compounded because you can take points out of the power stat at any time and place them into the any of the other four, meaning you have a less powerful drive but be better at something else. The problem is that you can’t do the reverse, once those points are spent on the other stats, they remain there. Since it isn’t obvious what they do, it is very easy to slip into a mindset that doesn’t help you play the game, and can cause you problems as you get towards the end game.

I ended up having to look at a FAQ to figure out what the stats did and how best to arrange them, but I had already put twenty hours into the game before that became something I had to do to try and figure out why it was getting so hard, and even then I was still at a loss as what most of them did.

This might speak to the universal language of games, and the players that understand it. I can look at a game like Final Fantasy and understand the upgrades and stats almost immediately, because they relate to a standard gaming activity: Combat. Attempting to translate those same mechanics to something more real world is more a challenge than one might think, because the fantasy bit of fighting monsters is easy to understand, but how do you represent the skill of a human playing golf?

Golf Story unfortunately does fail to find the balance with this, and the leveling system becomes something you have to do, but not something you want to do. You never want to discover just how strong and powerful your character can get, or I guess how good in this case, because you just don’t get how it works.

Another issue is one that is given away in the title: Golf. Now yes, if you don’t like the sport or don’t want to play a game about it then maybe it was obvious this was an issue, but for those who want to play for the opposite, then the issue is simply the amount.

Apart from playing ‘disc golf’ which is basically frisbee, everything you do uses the golf mechanics. While this means that you naturally get good at playing through sheer repetition, it also means there is a lot of golf, and combined with a last course that is almost unfairly hard, burning out is a real problem. I slogged through for review purposes, but honestly the game could have done with one less course and a much lower difficulty spike on the final one.

That last course is basically ‘the final battle’, but honestly is so ridiculously hard that it requires an almost perfect run to get through, and I threw myself at it for most of the last five hours of the thirty five I spent with the game. The perfection required grew frustrating, and I almost put the game down forever before I finally got the run I needed.

It adds to the feeling that the whole thing is just a little too long, and there is just lack of variety of things to do. To be fair, the game does make up for this by throwing scenarios at you that require light puzzle solving and talking to various characters, and those are well written and funny in spots, but it just isn’t enough.

Golf Story is a good game that misses out on being great due to a lack of task variety and an end game difficulty curve that is just way too steep. It’s just a slavish dedication to the idea of golf that ultimately lets it down, just a few different challenges and a slightly shorter overall play time would have led it to be something so much better.