Forspoken has fallen victim to a new bout of review-bombing, it would appear. Square Enix's latest major release hasn't received the sort of critical acclaim that the publisher is bound to have hoped it would receive, and those who have already played the game aren't keen to sing it any praises, from what's been shown so far.
With the majority of Forspoken reviews being fairly middling, it was implied from the get-go that the game wouldn't end up being the sort of smash hit that some may have expected it to be. On top of various technical issues and performance problems, Forspoken's content isn't getting much praise from most sources, either, and the player base's issues with the game have now come to a head.
Specifically, players have taken to posting remarkably negative review scores on Forspoken's Metacritic aggregate pages. While Forspoken's problems on PC have certainly been brought up numerous times, they're not even close to being the main problem players have with the game. Instead, most of the critique is directed at the game's writing and the characterization of the protagonist, Frey. The game's PC Metacritic page has over a hundred negative reviews with just over two dozen positive ones, while the PS5 Metacritic page features over three hundred negative posts at this time.
It's worth pointing out that the reviews of Forspoken's PS5 version do seem to be somewhat more tolerant of the game in a broad sense. While the negative posts certainly far outnumber those that are positive, the game does enjoy a somewhat higher score, too, with a 3.7/10 compared to the PC version's impressively low 2.0/10. Reviewers, too, have highlighted some of the game's good aspects on the PS5 aggregate page, such as the satisfying traversal mechanics, for example.
Since Forspoken has kickstarted 2023's open-world game roster, one could make an argument that the game's apparent failure is all the more disappointing. Being a huge, open-ended sandbox that focuses first and foremost on entertaining the player with its visuals and flashy combat sequences, Forspoken doesn't seem to have paid enough attention to its characters and narrative, as these are the most commonly criticized aspects of the game.
One could, perhaps, make the argument that Square Enix knew what was about to happen. Forspoken didn't get sent out to many reviewers early on, which could be taken to mean that the publisher wanted to keep things on the down low for as long as possible. There's no way to tell if that was the case, of course, so the only thing left to do is to wait and see if things turn around for the better in the future.
Source: Metacritic