Forspoken demo gets a seriously mixed response

Forspoken's free demo has launched on PS5, but if you were hoping this might finally answer whether Square Enix's new open-world RPG is going to be any good, it seems we're still not there yet.

You can grab the Forspoken demo on the PlayStation Store. It offers a brief recap of the setting, throws a very short tutorial at you, and then lets you loose to complete a few objectives and run around the open world. It doesn't look like this is a chunk directly taken out of the game - instead, it seems the demo offers a custom sandbox built out of the game assets to offer a taste of the combat and parkour systems.

The response seems seriously mixed so far - by which I mean some people love it and some people hate it, not that everyone thinks it's mediocre. The Forspoken subreddit is currently filled with discussion on the game, and it doesn't take long to see that players are divided.

One Reddit user calls it "the best demo I've played," saying that "Every once in a while, I think we all feel like something is tailor-made for us, and that's how I feel about Forspoken. After playing with the demo for 3+ hours, I can't describe how in love I am with this game."

Another Reddit user says "I'm really glad they released a demo" so they knew to hold off buying Forspoken at launch. They say that "everything just feels bad," citing unintuitive controls, blurry visuals, inconsistent performance, and saying that "the combat is clunky, slow, and just not fun."

You might want to just check out the demo and prepare your own opinion at this point. Personally, I'm not seeing the complaints about the visuals and performance, but the few minutes I've had to play haven't been nearly enough to come to terms with the combat system - though some players have managed to wring some pretty impressive action out of it already.

still_grasping_the_combat_but_honestly_im from r/Forspoken

Whether or not Forspoken makes our list of the best RPGs, the genre has never looked more impressive.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.