Foreclosed is an exciting-looking third-person action game, that looks like a comic. It’s the initial impression and it keeps a fantastic-looking structure all the way through.
It’s literally like a comic book comes to life, with a series of cutscenes, static images, comic book style boxes with text, and then your gameplay set in this world. The world is a cyberpunk style, where everyone has implants put into them when they’re born. They become the property of an organisation at this point.
Your character is at the heart of this – he is about to have his implants removed, and as he resists, he begins to uncover lots of shady dealings. He gets recruited in a Morpheus/Matrix-style and your adventure is set to try to resolve what is going on and keep your computer powers.
You do this as you do in all good video games – shoot everything up. And if Foreclosed wasn’t terrible at shooting, this would be fine. But it is – it’s awful. It’s just a nightmare to aim and hit anything, yet the enemies don’t have this issue at all – in fact, single hits will kill you. As such, playing Foreclosed becomes an exercise in extreme frustration.
I powered my way through – all in, the campaign was about four hours. It was a significant trade-off throughout, with the cool visuals and comic book style against the actual gameplay. There is a selection of power-ups to your abilities to enhance your character, which help a little but don’t quite improve things enough. Oddly, it sets the tone that it’s supposed to be a full-on third-person shooter, whereas I think Foreclosed would be best enjoyed without the shooting elements (although this isn’t possible).
The flicking between comic book narrative techniques and gameplay is a good one, but the gameplay just isn’t good enough to carry the execution. It feels fairly horrible to say this, but Foreclosed is best enjoyed by watching – it’s just a shame it’s a game.
Reviewed on PS5
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