F.I.S.T. Forged In Shadow Torch pt 2 | 4K playthrough | Deaths cut out
0Review – I was looking forward to playing this game since it is a Metroidvania but I was instantly put off by a couple of things. First of all, I was playing on the PC and the framerate was awful. I had to mess around with settings for ages before I could get it into a playable state. I have a very powerful PC that runs the highest spec games on high settings and a 2.5d game like this should have been a breeze to run on highest settings. I still never got a good frame rate even at the low settings and I’m no framerate snob either. The second thing that put me off was the characters. They are really ugly. I don’t want to play as animals in the first place, but to make them ugly too is something that visually does not entice me. There is a lot of popping in of assets on the screen, especially if you try to speedrun through the game and it struggles to load the next section. The FMV cut scenes look crap too. The audio is lower than the game audio so I relied on the subtitles so I wouldn’t have to keep messing with the volume. The storyline was pointless anyway. I just didn’t care at all about what was going on. All the characters are unlikeable and there is nothing interesting happening.
So, what kept me going for 20 hours? Well, it’s still a decent Metroidvania. The backgrounds and environments are beautiful, the map is huge, and there are lots of secrets to explore. Once I got past the initial couple of hours and the game opened up to me, I got hooked.
There was a point in the about half way through the game when the difficulty just suddenly spiked so there are some really hard boss fights in the game later on, and there are a lot of them. A lot of the time they are recycled boss fights but with additional regular enemies, which can be a bit annoying if I didn’t like the boss. Which was a lot of the time. Most bosses were a chore for me and I worked out why. They are usually a long slog, and I could get to the final last hits often on my first attempt, but then the boss would do a series of attacks right at the end that drained all of my energy. This meant I would have to start the whole long boss fight again getting passed the easy boring bit, along with the unskippable cut-scene where nothing happens.
The fighting system is good in this game but it is unnecessarily complicated. You can buy and learn all sorts of moves and put them together for combo attacks but there is just too much to think about so I found myself using the same moves. There is a training section that teaches you combos but they are so difficult to pull off, that I wouldn’t even attempt to try them against an enemy. I only did the training to unlock the rewards, and I even gave up on the last training lesson because I couldn’t link the moves together even though they were written on the screen. It’s like a Street Fighter Combo challenge. It wouldn’t be useful to use a combo in a fight because you don’t often get more than a second to attack before you have to dodge another enemy from behind. Or the enemy you attack might be in the middle of his own combo which you can’t stun it out of. It’s way too dangerous so I mostly used my good old trusty charge hit which I would charge whilst dodging and then let it go when I get a split second next to the enemy.
There are extra non-combat moves that you are given throughout the game that help you move around more efficiently and they are inventive and genuinely helpful. But the last one that you get is the upgrade to your dash/dodge move that allows you to go through your enemies. This should have been given at the beginning of the game as it was intuitive to me that I should be able to dash through enemies but after spending the entirety of the game training to dodge away from the enemy, suddenly I had to relearn my dodging for the final fight.
If you’ve never played a Metroidvania before, this would be a great game, but I’ve been spoiled by a lot of high-quality games recently like Prince of Persia and Axiom Verge 2. Metroidvanias seem to be consistently of very high quality so a game really has to be top quality to be considered in the same league and this doesn’t make the cut, even though it is still good.
Apparently the Switch version is technically inferior with terrible loading times. It’s a shame that this came free on PS Plus a couple of days after I started the PC version as I’m sure the PS5 version would have been better but I wasn’t going to do the first 5 hours again to find out.
Rating 7/10
Played on PC
No cheats used
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