Farsiders review

I’m not generally one to complain too much about indie projects when they’re at least made with passion, but there’s a lot about Farsiders that I just can’t get past to enjoy the game. It’s marketed as being akin to Hades or Curse of the Dead Gods, but it’s almost nothing like either; it’s actually a fairly straightforward hack ‘n’ slash action game with a time-hopping narrative that does little with either of its very different settings.

As Cassie, you’re the newest member of an elite fighting unit called The Spectralons. They’re recruited from the winners of a TV show called “The Search”, which you win at the beginning in the tutorial section. There’s such a weird disconnect between narrative beats, characters, tone, and setting that I kind of just followed through the first hour on autopilot. For example, as you make your way towards the Spectra headquarters, you’re attacked by a bunch of random goons, who you beat to death in the street, despite being surrounded by armed police.

When you do get to Spectra and meet your new teammates, well… It’s not great. I get that the devs aren’t native English speakers, but the localisation is poor. The text is filled with grammatical errors, mixed tenses, badly-phrased cliches, and the dialogue is cringeworthy at best. Cassie has a locket which she mentions constantly, and which eventually becomes relevant when, during her first mission alongside fellow Spectralon Weston, she’s sent back in time to an ancient world called Tellune.

Apparently, the characters she meets in the past are based on Arthurian legend, but it’s a heavily annotated and corrupted version of Aruthurian legend. The modern city of Ostahl and the ancient land of Tellune give little indication of even being set on Earth, despite some clumsy references to things like Babu Frik, which suggests Star Wars exists in this universe. It’s all such a mess I can’t tell what the intent is.

The combat is also messy, with a needlessly complex card system and the ability to apply mods to Cassie’s sword and pistol. There are some decent abilities, though, such as ricochet bullets and a few screen-filling attack moves that look slick and deal heavy damage to enemies. But I was probably more enamoured with these than I should have been, simply because they were the only things that brought the combat to life.

Movement is slow and cumbersome, and Cassie’s single combo becomes very dull very quickly. Ranged enemies have a superhuman ability to hit you, while melee enemies will always, without fail, just run at you, lining up as you kite them. There’s a parry that’s far too easy to land, and a dodge roll that will get you out of harm’s way easily.

A smattering of bosses bar Cassie’s path, but these, too, are quite simple. They telegraph every attack with huge red lines on the ground, and apart from soaking up damage are pretty simple to take down.

I had less fun with the Vaults, though. These are opened when you complete two corresponding combat challenges (barriers drop and you must kill respawning enemies until they stop respawning). The first Vault I found was like a bullet hell shooter where you have to survive for a frankly ridiculous amount of time as a central enemy that you can’t harm in any way disgorges projectiles that can hit you if you’re too close, let alone in the way. I hated it so much that I avoided Vaults where possible from then on.

It’s clear to see that the developer had a vision when making Farsiders, but somewhere along the way all the wires seem to have got crossed. I can’t tell if the story is meant to be serious or silly, if the dialogue is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek or earnest. The comparisons to Hades are simply unfounded, and the combat needed a lot more development time.

Graphically, Farsiders doesn’t have much of an identity of its own. It’s pretty enough in places, but the character models are unmemorable and whatever atmosphere is afforded by the opening cutscene is shattered by a growling voice over dropping unnecessary F-bombs throughout.

There are glimmers of the game Gambit Ghost Studio wanted to make here, but everything about Farsiders just feels undercooked and unfinished. The dual world premise isn’t strong enough of a draw to make up for the clunky combat, poor writing and bad localisation, and there are just too many better alternatives out there.