A competent and enjoyable Metroidvania. I loved the world design here, the backgrounds in many of the areas are beautiful, the machinery on display looks badass and the character designs are great - especially the robot enemies.

It is very typical Metroidvania fare - exploring a large map, unlocking abilities to access new areas, opening up shortcuts as you go to aid in future navigation. I think the game is broadly successful here, exploration is fun and satisfying and many of the different areas have a nice distinctive style to them.

The weapon variety is cool, and you can unlock a bunch of different moves as the game progresses. I would say there are almost too many combat options, the game has a sort of tutorial section that teaches you complicated combos... but I didn't really find any reason to use them in the actual game. Most enemies and bosses can be taken out with a simple combination of dodging and charged punches. I tried to mix it up a bit toward the end of the game, but a lot of the time the enemies would shut down combos by blocking or teleporting away.

There is also a parry system you unlock partway through the game, this was quite satisfying to pull off but I never really felt confident in it. It works by pushing the left stick in the direction of the attack at the right moment, but the correct moment was often poorly telegraphed and it wasn't really clear which direction I should be pressing. I learned to parry quite a few moves reliably, but any time meeting a new enemy it would be just trial and error figuring out when to parry. Much easier to just dodge and charge punch.

I felt as though the game lost polish as it progressed, perhaps the latter portions were not playtested as thoroughly. A few enemy encounters were way harder than the rest of the game. I also felt that a some of the areas were overly sprawling and tedious to navigate, particularly the underwater sections.

Overall though, the game is quite breezy and fun to play. If you like the genre, it's an easy recommend. Although it feels like I was more critical than I intended in this review, the game is successful in a lot of key areas and delivers a mostly solid experience throughout.

I have mixed feelings about this game.
The exploration and ways to move across the map are cool, specially once you get the third arm, that's when moving becomes faster and more fun to play. The scenarios, characters and landscapes are beatiful. I think that's the game's strongest point. I enjoyed all the visual aspects of this game. The music and voice acting are okay, nothing to complain about that.
The RPG elements / skill tree is pretty basic, once you get each arm, you have a few movements and combos to unlock and use in combat. You can also get a few collectibles that help to increase your health and other stats.
The combat is good, but definitely could be emproved. To be honest, it was a bit frustrating from time to time, specially in the first few hours. I know this is gonna be way too specific, but there is one move (charged punch) which is requiered to defeat a specific kind of shielded enemy and it takes forever to fully charge and be able to use it, so it becomes annoying when you try to use it and get interrupted every time before it's fully charged (later on, you can defeat them with other movements). Also, I think it would have been cool to have a block/parry skill. I know there is the parry upgrade, but it's not part of the main storyline, so I just found out about it after finishing the game.
Storywise, I think the game tries to make you care about its characters and lore, but honestly, I just didn't. I liked the general setting of the story, but honestly I didn't care much about the deeper lore and history of that world or their characters.
So, in conclusion, I enjoyed the game and the exploration specially. Right before the final boss, I went back to explore a little bit more and solve a few more puzzles and collectibles, just for fun. But the combat and story, could have been a bit more compelling and fun.

This Metroidvania feels so fun to play. The world alone, a Chinese diesel-punk setting with anthropomorphic animals, is just a joy to look at and navigate. The three weapons are great to play with and when you get good with them, it's a real blast.

It's not perfect though. Besides a rather bare bones cut-and-paste story, the gameplay difficulty of the bosses on normal sometimes lets the experience down as they can be brutal (the last boss I conceded and changed the difficulty to easy after 30 attempts...). There's also some nasty framerate / load-in issues on PS4.

Some of this is excusable maybe as this was developed by a small Chinese team. Speaking of, I recommend playing this in its original Chinese audio as well. There's few games released in the West that have Chinese language and this is one of the better ones. Probably will come back to this in future so gets a 4* from me.

No game has worked harder to make me stop playing in the first thirty minutes or so. Long, unskippable cutscenes? Check. Talking animals? Check. Talking animals with jiggle physics (blech!)? Check. Ridiculous premise with "Duke Nukem trying to be serious and emotional" delivery?[1] Check. A bug that spams the same voice lines over and over again? Check.
I maybe could have powered through this if this were a well-regarded metroidvania, along the lines of Symphony of the Night or Aria of Sorrow, but the game has received middling reviews and there are plenty of alternatives I can play. And also, the hands on the raccoon/tanuki character were creepy. He's a talking raccoon, but has human hands rather than paws. I don't want to think about it.

[1] The Wolfenstein: The New Order approach to cinematic storytelling.

I was initially drawn in by the asethic and trailers and while i do appreciate that when I was playing it I did have some major problems with FIST. To be frank the level design sucks. There is a lot of samey looking areas and where at times it feels like you are treking great distances without enemies or anything to do. Warp points are so far and few in between it feels like you have to progress half the map to get to one. The game was really repititive in exploration and combat. I don't think they did enough with the world or story to keep me interested. Halfway through i lost interest.

I usually have a hard time with Metroidvania platformers; I find most of them very difficult. However, F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch proved to be a lovely surprise in that the difficulty wasn't punishing much at all. That's not to say it's too easy either - there is a considerable challenge here – but it feels much more accessible than a lot of other platformers I've played recently. Unlocking and using weapons made this continuously fun to play through due to the combat being super well done. This gets a big recommend from me.

[Played on Xbox Game Pass]

Gameplay completa:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLquqGvRscIxsLm8hgnlzSZsnlhM4cbcYS&si=AOcoJk6aVYlVBxXH

F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch é um metroidvania com combate arcade, situado em Torch City, um mapa com design único. Enfrente dezenas de inimigos distintos, cada um com suas próprias armas e ataques, cujo objetivo é acabar com você.

Depois que os animais de Torch City foram derrotados pela legião invasora na Resistance War, seis anos atrás, o antigo guerreiro da Resistance, Rayton, o coelho, evitou chamar a atenção.
A prisão de um amigo mostrou que ele não tinha escolha, senão vestir o punho de metal gigante e enfrentar aqueles que o oprimiam. Mal sabia ele que seria pego em uma tempestade de conspirações envolvendo a Legion, a Resistance e a Rat Gang.

So I was just looking for a game to keep me entertained until Starfield comes out but this was surprisingly good. A well crafted metroidvania which reminds me of the Ori series (though obviously not reaching those heights, that one’s setting the bar too high). The level design is really good and the combat is great with a few different weapons and a combo based system that’s really satisfying, even if sometimes a little clunky. The only downside is the story which is never really that interesting and by the end I just didn’t really care about it, making some unskippable cutscenes a bit of a chore, but the gameplay was still tight and that’s what kept me hooked

Os caras fizeram a gata de sacanagem.

Joguinho visualmente daora, combate é o que tem de melhor, muita boss fight legal e movimentação que lembra Ori.

Só achei meio paia o parry que é no analógico e a falta de mais pontos de fast travel que desanimou explorar. Tirando as lutas contra os chefes, as duas ultimas horas deu uma cansada.