Review: FORGONE Slices The Enemy Down Awkwardly
Platforming games have been around forever, and it’s more and more difficult to find unique spins on the genre as time goes on. Foregone is an action platformer that and gets some things very right with some odd visual choices, but ultimately feels too familiar to be called great.
The presentation and the story as a whole here don’t really do much more than act as a reason for robots and violence to exist. The character you control is only known as the Arbiter and her connection to the world just seems to be but that she must kill anything that moves. The visual style is made of pixelated environments and 3-D characters. However, the 3-D characters are more or less converted into pixelated versions too. It’s an interesting concept and brings life and motion to the characters and enemies, but they also felt out of place in the world because their detail or lack thereof seemed inconsistent with the environment around them. The character designs and world are pretty good looking but feel awkwardly disjointed.
The gameplay is what’s best here. Combining a number of different platforming ideas works well surprisingly well. The variety of melee and ranged weapons, the abilities and their progression, and the stats make for an engaging blend of combat and platforming. It’s just that some of the deeper parts of the game’s progression are never well communicated to the audience and players could go hours without knowing how to use the resources that they collect. The loot in this game is also pretty good, but also oddly bad. After receiving various different armor pieces, accessories, and weapons that will sometimes have special abilities, players have a lot of choices to make. However, I found that I collected a lot more terrible loot that I had to spend time trashing instead of useful or unique gear.
The upgrade system in the game seemed arbitrary when it came to gear. A handful of times I invested lots of my resources into upgrading a certain weapon or armor piece and then would randomly pick up an exact replica of the gear but with overall better stats. This system of random drops and their frequency made the upgrading system somewhat obsolete. On the other hand, if I decided to not invest my upgrading materials, I could go hours without picking up a similar gun or melee weapon and waste all that time with non-upgraded armor or weapons. It feels inconsistent and not worthwhile to have an upgrading system if players might pick up better versions of their best gear at any time.
Overall, Forgone is a good experience, all in all, there’s no doubt about that. The core gameplay and fighting feel great at times, but the odd systems of loot and lackluster presentation make this game feel closer to average than excellence.
