Games worth discovering

This messy action RPG feels like the first draft of a better game

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FARSIDERS

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SHOULD I PLAY FARSIDERS?

With plenty of better action RPGs around right now, it’s probably safe to skip Farsiders. While the artwork and soundtrack are delightful, the story is a jumbled mess of ideas and the English translation is poorer still. There are some neat ideas for combat, but the dull AI and sludgy pace keep it from ever feeling exciting.

TIME PLAYED

I played Farsiders for two and a half hours. I traveled through a portal from a violent cyberpunk city to a fantastical, alien version of Camelot, where King Arthur and his knight Lancelot sent me to retrieve moonstone fragments that were meant to be attached to Excalibur. I recovered the first fragment after fighting my way through a treehouse casino deep in a swamp, and I’ve gained several new skills and spells as I leveled up my character, Camilla.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT FARSIDERS?

• It looks great. I loved the art style and character designs in Farsiders. Each area I visited—the cyberpunk city, Camelot castle, the casino deep in the haunted marsh—looked completely distinct and was rich in lovely details. Spell effects and enemies were all well-done too. The static, hand-drawn character art that popped up during dialogue sequences was more run-of-the-mill, but I thought the in-game animated characters all looked terrific.

• Exciting boss encounters. I liked that Farsiders threw boss fights at me pretty frequently, because they were always interesting without feeling like insurmountable difficulty spikes. While I could get by in most combat situations just by firing my ranged attack off while dashing out of the way of the occasional enemy charge, bosses required me to pull back from time to time, switch up my tactics, and sometimes dodge complex waves of projectiles, bullet-hell style.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT FARSIDERS?

• The story is an incoherent mess. While it was cool jumping between radically different settings, Farsiders’ narrative never kept pace with the rest of the game. It introduced a large cast of characters without giving me any time to get to know them, and the entire motivation for what I was supposed to be doing quickly got lost in a jumble of made-up jargon. It’s not that it has terrible ideas, it’s just in rough shape, almost like it’s a first draft.

• Combat is pretty dull. I enjoyed some of the boss fights in Farsiders, but generally the combat left me pretty cold. Even when I started adding active spells to my moveset, fights always felt the same: I’d dash into a group of enemies, land a few hits, dash away, let off a few ranged attacks to deal with archers on the edges of the arena, and pop my special abilities when they were available. Enemies never did anything surprising or clever, so it always felt like I was just whittling multiple health pools down before I could move on.

• Bad directions. It was often very unclear where I was supposed to go next, and it wasn’t until several hours into the game that I discovered by accident that by pressing in the right thumbstick, I could have a line drawn on the screen showing me where I should be headed. There’s no minimap or world map to refer to, so before I stumbled across the navigation line feature, I had to work out my next objective based on the last confusing NPC conversation I’d had.

• NPC dialogue is terrible. There were loads of typos and incorrectly used words in Farsiders, but beyond that, some of the lines were just embarrassing. One character actually compared another character to Babu Frik from The Rise of Skywalker. Again, it left me feeling like I was reading a first draft rather than a finished work.