Forspaken: A Missed Opportunity in Action-RPGs

When it comes to action role-playing games, there's a fine line between mediocrity and outright disaster. Unfortunately for Square Enix, their latest offering - Forspoken - strays perilously close to the latter end of this spectrum.

This game is an absolute waste of both your hard-earned cash and precious time that could be better spent playing virtually anything else currently available on the market. Even if you were somehow handed a free copy as part of some sort of cruel joke, it's still unlikely that Forspellen't manage to capture even a sliver of your attention.

The game's narrative is an absolute mess - convoluted and incoherent at every turn. Characters are paper-thin cardboard cutouts with all the depth and personality you'd expect from something thrown together by a team of disinterested high schoolers on a Friday afternoon. The dialogue? Forget about it; it sounds like someone took every overused RPG cliche, threw them into a blender, hit puree, then proceeded to read out the resulting smoothie in an tone that veered wildly between bored monotony and manic desperation.

And don't even get me started on the gameplay itself. The combat is clunky and unresponsive - like trying to wrestle a greased pig while wearing oven mitts. Even basic enemy encounters quickly devolve into tedious button-mashing marathons, with all sense of strategy or finesse thrown out the window.

To top it all off, even the game's supposed 'highlights' are nothing more than shallow facsimiles of better games that came before. The traversal mechanics, for instance - designed to evoke a certain other cult classic action-adventure series - feel like they were lifted straight from someone else's playthrough videos and sloppily re-skinned with minimal effort.

In short: avoid Forspoken at all costs unless you have an insatiable appetite for frustration. Even then, even if it means sacrificing any remaining scrap of pride or self-respect, do yourself a favor - keep your wallet firmly in your pocket where it belongs.

Rating: 0/10

Recommendation: Stick with something else. Anything else would be better than subjecting yourself to this abomination.

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