What an absolute mess. Hands down the worst Triple-A game I’ve played this generation, possibly in the past two generations.

I know the demo has been out for a month or so now but I didn’t bother. The full game is out Tuesday, so I figured I’d go pull it up before they inevitably pull the demo post-launch.

Based on the demo, the game is a trainwreck in every possible respect.

Tonally this game is trying SO HARD to be edgy. Embarrassingly hard. Based on the demo this may be the first game in history to get an M-rating purely due to language because the player character Frey is incapable of going more than 12 seconds without dropping an fbomb. Got shot by a random enemy? “UGH FUCK.” Got a levelup? “FUCK YEAH POWER UP.” Ran across a new mob of enemies? “FUCKIN . . UGH. FUCK.” Using the wrong attack and it’s resistant? “SHIT, DIDN’T WORK. FUCK.” And it’s just CONSTANT, in between encounters, during encounters, during down-time, the chatter is just endless, unlike any game I can recall in recent history because I haven’t played (and probably won’t play) High on Life. It’s really bad and completely unnecessary. This game would probably be “E 10+ for Mild Fantasy Violence” if it wasn’t for the language, which is completely absolutely insane.

Mechanically it’s inexplicably needlessly complicated. Incoherent to the point that you’d think the team responsible had never seen or interacted with a third person action game before. This game is a Magical Isekai that seems to be about collecting a diverse selection of magical abilities while zooping around the map because you can magically parkour skate everywhere. So based on that you’d expect maybe a character-action game like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry or Solar Ash or any number of games like that control-wise. Or maybe something a bit more deliberate like God of War. This play like none of them. This plays like a game designed for a controller with 78 buttons, played by a player with 14 fingers.

All attacks are on the triggers. Face buttons are inexplicably unused except for Circle, which is overloaded to the point that it is used for ALL movement modifiers. Run, jump, parkour, dodge, it does EVERYTHING. Triangle? Square? X? Nothing. No, Forspoken has better plans for how to use buttons.

R2 is your primary attack. L2 is your cooldown / alt attack. R2+L2 is your charge-up ultimate. How do you do a heavy attack or a light attack? Use the Shoulders instead? No, screw you, this is a PS5 exclusive title so Light Attack is “fight the stupid haptic motor thing to quickly tap” and Heavy Attack is “really fight the stupid motor and hold the trigger down”.

The Shoulders are dedicated to the horror that is ring menus. There is seemingly no dedicated menu for setting up what school of magic you’re using, or what specific spell you have mapped to L or R, you are expected to do this on the fly during or between combat encounters. Hold L1 or R1 to open a ring menu to pick which spell you’re using on either side, hold both to open another ring menu to totally swap out which school of magic you’re using.

You are ABSOLUTELY expected to do this right in the heat of combat, because enemies have strengths / weaknesses, and certain schools appear to be wholly focused on melee vs ranged combat. The demo had two schools, one is purely melee, one is purely ranged, and even in this short of a demo they throw a mix of enemies at you, some that absolutely need ranged damage and others that take next to zero damage from ranged.

It feels awful, you spend all of combat just wailing on one of the triggers, occasionally flipping schools and rewiring your brain to remember “oh wait long-presses suck now, I need to tap? Wait no long-presses are good but I need to aim?” And this is only with two schools of magic, I assume there are going to be more. I’m sure it’s going to click with someone but it seems wholly unnecessary and I imagine after an extended play session it would end up painful since everything is on your triggers.

Final major complaint, the setting is painfully generic. I don’t have a lot to say about this. Just imagine “Magical High Fantasy”. Whatever you came up with is probably close. Big impressive mountains, spoopy ruins, alabaster cities, the occasional floating rock island for some reason. They’ve got it all!

The game doesn’t have zero heart. The game has negative heart. It starts as generic, then it heaps on an abrasive, juvenile and incessant script, and then it caps it off with the most needlessly complex and painful control scheme ever seen in this genre.

Quick Aside: I legitimately can’t believe I’m knocking a game for being “too juvenile”, because I love dumb and/or juvenile humor, I don’t care about profanity, but this game is just so lazy about it. It’s like they put their prototype together to pitch the game to Squeenix and had no idea what their story was.

And when they were pressed to describe their player character all they could come up with was “uhhh…it’s a girl” – and the execs from Square perk up – “who … uh… says swears” – and everybody at Squeenix just starts losing their minds screaming and clapping and starting to write the checks.

And it’s so frustrating, because if not for the language, this is the kind of game my wife would love (needlessly confusing controls and all), and would have no problem playing with our kid around, but because the player character can’t go twelve seconds without saying fuck it’s a hard pass.

I will not be buying this game. No one should buy this game. I will, however, be carefully watching the reviews because it’s going to be tremendous content.