izigame.me

Upon its announcement, I highly anticipated Bleak Faith: Forsaken's release. The atmosphere and enemy design quickly drew me in. But the mixed reviews at its debut left me hesitant. After watching excerpts of a play-through of the game , I remained enamored with what initially drew me in, the world; but my desire to experience the game-play soured, ultimately stopping me from purchasing the game. One year later, and many patches later, I finally made the dive after hearing of all the improvements made. The question remains, is it better now than upon release?
Sadly no. The game went from being broken and easily exploitable, with mid and late game bosses easily trivialized; to being unbalanced in numerous different ways. What pains me so is the amount of interesting ideas being brought forth by the game, the quality of life improvements that are so shockingly obvious after having experienced them only in this game, the uniqueness of its a medieval-cyberpunk world, and much more, all of which fall flat due to its short-comings.
The game is an open world souls-like similar to Dark Souls 1 in nature, interconnected and non-linear. However, this non-linearity falls apart at times in the current version. On several occasions I found myself in a new area, fine fighting all the random enemies, but unable to even moderately compete with the boss. Only to later learn that I was tackling a region meant for later. The game was originally styled so that you could fight any boss in any order (to certain degrees of difficulty), this was facilitated by a system wherein any weapon is usable, and easily upgrade-able, encouraging experimentation. And while the weapons remain relatively the same (different now due to levels), the game presents you with very obvious hard walls that are, dare I say, insurmountable until the approved point in the game. This forces you to follow specific tracks along every play-through, in a game that is supposed to be open world. A relatively recent change to the game, but easily the most destructive in my opinion.
On the other hand, easily the best part about the game is the weapon system (the world being a close second), and other game play elements surrounding it. First and foremost, being able to only receive one of every weapon/equipment is a blessing, and simplifies grinding/item management. The upgrade and crystal system are simple, but elegant (my only issue is with late game crystals requiring a bit too much grinding if you want several different armor/weapon sets). Being able to switch to whatever weapon I wanted whenever I wanted, had me trying more weapons in my first play through of this game, than probably any other game. While I quickly fell into a using one weapon as my main, I often experimented with new weapons as my secondary. While this makes it easy to change play-styles, there are still hard limits to this. For every major boss you defeat, you can obtain a new perk, these are permanent, and cannot be changed, unlike your levels or your abilities. This severely limits your build, so why doesn't the level re-spec potion also allow you to change your perks? In fact, why add levels at all? why not maintain the original and unique idea of your stats being determined quite literally by how you build you character in terms of armor/weapons/rings/talismans.
The combat is the most troubling aspect, and in an action game this is a major issue. While many changes have been made to improve fights such as hard/soft parry and blocks, the combat is often floaty, lacking impact, and boss magic spell attacks are badly executed, often being devastating to most builds, nearly unavoidable while locked on, and just too drawn out. Prime offenders of this are Arch-inquisitor Bellisarius, Nurgei, and Silicon Visage; but almost all the bosses are guilty of this save for: Konrad the Traitor, Plague Nemesis, and Mutated Ghoul; who just so happen to be my favorite fights in the game, all early fights, and all good fights. However, even the fights I consider good, are plagued by how spongy every boss is, some of them even taking 10+ minutes on a strength heavy build.
Even when I found myself frustrated and about to give up on the game, I was pushed forward by my desire to see the rest of the world. And while my review is largely negative, I will say I enjoyed my experience. Bleak Faith: Forsaken brings new ideas to the table that are so good that they will likely be used by many games in the future; and while I have no desire to return to this game any time soon, I do look forward to any future projects these three developers work on in the future.
Game-play: 3/10
Music/Sound: 4/10
World/Environment: 8/10
Atmosphere: 7/10
Replay-ability/Build Diversity: 5/10
Fun: 4/10
Total: 5/10