F.I.S.T. - Forged in Shadow Torch: A metroidvania that just isn't quite there....

I love metroidvania games. Other than RTS games they are my favorite type of game to play. Side-scrolling with great updated modern graphics are even better to me than 3D ones. A lot of this has a lot to do with the fact that I am an old-school gamer who was here when PONG was rolled out and grew up with Atari, Nintendo, you name it. Side-scrolling is all I had until the mid 90's so I like it a bit better.

FIST is a metroidvania done in an dystopian future where animal hybrids are the combatants interspersed with robotics and humanoids of some sort. I am fine with all of this. What I am not fine with is, well, let's just get into it shall we?

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The game starts out with a bunch of cutscenes, which I am never a fan of but endured because it gave me a moment to clear up my living room of the detritus from the dinner I had just consumed while watching an episode of a TV show. The story is pretty typical and honestly, very skip-able. Some evil command has started pushing the people of a city too far and now the once complacent occupants are fighting back, namely in the form of you, a grizzled rabbit ex-soldier whose old friend who is a bear was kidnapped by the baddies.

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You were reluctantly drawn into this situation but go and put on your old combat suit that you haven't used in many moons and off you go to go and find your friend and it is telegraphed that there is much more to the story than just your one buddy disappearing, even in the intro.

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After the, honestly, too long, introduction sequence including multiple cutscenes we get sent to the cyberpunk city below and are sent traipsing around in various directions looking for this and then that in order to powerup and get additional skills in order to reach previously unreachable areas.

Like you would expect you start out with a jump ability, a weak attack, and a strong attack. Then your arsenal grows to include wall-climb, double-jump, and then later a variety of combos executed by unlocking special attacks or simply by being taught button combos that may or may not have existed before you got to that point in the game.

It's fine... it's not great but it's fine.

I say that it's not great because combat just seems repetitive as hell right out of the gate and even after getting a few upgrades the enemy attack patterns remain largely the same and by "the same" i mean retarded. Their easily predicted attack patterns consist of run at you slowly, then swing a sword while a guy behind them has a laser scope pointed at you that once fired, shoots an exceptionally slow-moving particle at you.

Every now and then some sort of flying robots are introduced that are more of an annoyance than an actual danger because you have to double-jump and then triple slash weak attack mid-air. I presume other methods of dispatching these enemies are introduced later but for the first 2 hours of gameplay this is essentially every encounter.

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_{Should I let him shoot me or jump over the incredibly slow-moving projectile?}

You do encounter a tiny bit of resistance once you get to the first boss but the attacks are again, telegraphed like crazy and while he does hit hard, these attacks are easily avoided once you get hit by them once.

I will praise them for this actually, because a first boss SHOULD be a bit of a pushover and preparing you for increased difficulty that is coming later but here is the first problem I have with this game: It takes them a really long time to ramp up the difficulty to the point where you ever feel even remotely like there is even a small chance you could possibly lose. In that time you spend a TON of time wandering through mostly empty hallways and when you do encounter an enemy, mostly they are nothing to fear and are merely a waste of time rather than something that is even remotely difficult to overcome.

For people that read my stuff regularly perhaps it seems like I am impossible to please because if something is too difficult such as say Elden Ring, I don't like it, but if it is too easy, I lose interest very quickly as well. I'm ok with something being too easy, but if it is, at least keep things moving and this is the major downside of FIST in my book.

The large areas that you must traverse through are filled with mostly nothing and you are being made to go vast distances for the sake of making you go vast distances.... I guess.

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I also like that you are given a lot of freedom as far as which upgrades you are going to select based largely upon the currency that you find scattered about. But herein lies another issue: You don't REALLY need to ever use these things because most of them don't really offer much of a tactical advantage over simply jump dashing over your enemy's telegraphed attack patterns and striking them from behind. I got to the point where I decided that I wasn't going to upgrade my attacks at all until I needed them and well, in 3 hours I never needed them.

The platforming is fine. I generally enjoy platforming but not when it exists just for the sake of existing and doesn't really have anything to do with impeding your progression and instead is just a jumpy jumpy section that you annoying fall to the bottom of several times in a row and eventually make your way to the top only to the encounter the, by now exceptionally boring, same mobs have respawned in exactly the same places.

To top things off I am not at all a fan of the music that is playing and I also found myself skipping most of the dialogue entirely because the voice-acting sounds phoned in and low-budget.

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The map is apparently quite large but this is actually a downside as well since most of your experience with it is going to be spent endlessly walking and jumping up stuff that you have already been to many many times previous and it is just annoying to have to scale that tower, again! I think they may have made the map larger than it needed to be simply in order to say that they have a big map.

Other things that I didn't enjoy was something that I really appreciate in other metroidvanias that I have played and this is areas that you clearly cannot get to yet because you haven't yet obtained the skill necessary to reach it. This game is practically devoid of this so your endless backtracking doesn't even have some sort of hidden area alternative when you are forced to walk back through it.

There is no leveling up either so you quickly find yourself not even bothering with fighting the respawned enemies and just jump dash past them.

After 3-4 hours of playing this, hoping it would get better as it carried on, I am convinced that this game simply stays like this for the entire playthrough and therefore I am going to bail on it. If in 4 hours a game hasn't at least made me somewhat excited about the next stage, I think it is time to move on. I paid exactly $0 for this game as it is currently included in the PS-Plus Extra catalogue, so I suppose there is no harm done.

I can't really recommend that anyone pay money for this game but I also don't think I am wrong when I say that there isn't really any particularly good reason to play it even for free. It's just a watered down and uninteresting version of Hollow Knight or Ender Lilies with a bad and repetitive soundtrack.

No offense if you liked it, but I don't!