2 reviews liked by Coldkorn


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.

Love the art style (both for cutscenes and both characters and monsters in general). Soundtrack is alright-to-fun in spots.

Things that either bothered me or really got on my nerves:

-- Had a freeze at the end of a quest where the audio and all functional gameplay still seemed to work (I could move and interact with menus on my controller, but the screen had frozen on a specific frame. Had to restart and do the quest again, not the biggest deal.

-- The map UI is TERRIBLE. A series of boxes that are connected to indicate rooms, with all visible-but-unexplored exits hidden whenever you highlight an area because it covers the area in a white border that includes exit paths? Symbols that don't have a legend, but some of them tell you what they mean when you go over them and some just ask you to divine the intention of those symbols? Make a map legend and make paths you've explored more readily understandable.

-- 8-bit era jump logic where swinging a weapon while jumping in mid-air causes you to cease all forward momentum. This is OBNOXIOUS at times, especially if you happen to be using 2-Handed weapons that have a slow start-up and need to hit something above you and off to the side.

-- A boss that reverses your controls with homing projectiles for several seconds at a time.

-- That same boss causing you to get stuck on a door when trying to move because the door needs to let you know you don't have the key from the boss fight yet to leave the room.

-- Dying to a boss because you pressed the button for the inventory screen while bleeding out and somehow the start menu popped up to ask you if you wanted to continue playing or load a game, so coming back to the game to try and activate the inventory screen didn't leave you enough time to get to the inventory screen a second time. This one bothers me because I had the menu glitch happen probably at least half a dozen times before this and I couldn't tell you what prompted it other than that it would just happen now and then.

Level design for the first 60% or so of the maps is a mixed bag for me, but that jump mechanic is horrendous and the glitches are off-putting. Not even going to go into how strange the HP/MP system feels and the healing system -- I didn't like them, short answer. Just not interested in finishing this game.