F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch Review (BaronFalke)
8/10
Important:
I played the game on SteamDeck. I had to reduce nearly all settings to "low". This way the combos were not lagging etc. but maybe this was also the cause for some strange effects.
COMBAT
The combat is pretty nice. It starts easy with same easy enemies and will get harder later in game. Also "old" locations will be upgraded with heavier units. The only thing I didn't like about the game were the enemies who can shoot. I am not sure if it was only coincidence, but it somehow always felt like the enemy is exactly knowing where you will land with your character and shoots at exactly this position.
In some cases this is really painfull since you cannot even move. I had situations where I was hit by multiple enemies in different combos in a row and believe it or not: I could not even stand up and was killed. These moments made me nearly smash my controller.
BOSSES
The bosses are a huge pain. If you get angry really fast due failures ... then avoid this game. Some of the bosses are such a pain, you will curse the developers and all gods you know. But in the end ... the solution is to memorize their patterns (for this you need many tries) and learn to dodge or counterattack. But using the SteamDeck it was sometimes only luck if the controls did what you told to do.
And you also need to learn the combos. If you use them correctly, you sometimes can instant kill a boss. But in my case it was most time the same combo (a very basic one).
GRAPHICS
The graphics are really nice. The atmosphere is pretty cool. I liked all the characters and all locations. Also the "minigames" and achievements are pretty well done. But on my SteamDeck I encountered some issues if you switch between some locations. The textures and objects were not loaded so you had blue background and colliders ... after running for a while the level was build correctly. But you could watch the renderer building everything ... it was that slow.
STORY
Very interesting. Also very well done because of the characters. I only miss the german audio. Would have preferred a full german language included.
You can discover a lot of stuff in the game and you will get some weapons and utilities during the gameplay. I liked it very much. All in all, it was a nice adventure. But difficult.