YAR: Forgotten Throne - Playstation 5 Review

YAR:Forgotten Throne by developer Honor Games and publisher Axyos Games Entertainment LLC—Sony PlayStation 5 review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated Reading Time: 4.5 minutes.

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YAR: the Forgotten Throne will see you “Choose your path as a Warrior, Volkhv, or Archer and journey across the lands of Borea in a story-driven open-world RPG. Uncover the source of the darkness poisoning its forests and wildlife as you take on 100+ varied quests, side with one of two factions, and shape your hero through progression, active and passive skills, and character attributes.

Taking a page out of the early 2000’s action adventure book, I was looking forward to my time with YAR. Conceptually? It works. You are a Viking looking for a new challenge and you are starting from the ground up. You can select your difficulty. You can customize your character into a Warrior, Wizard, or Ranger type. Set in a reasonably sized open environment, there are lots of townspeople to talk with. Some will give you quests, others will provide you goods. Finally, there are lots of enemies to face off against if you want to survive.

Unfortunately, while I can imagine everything coming together nicely on the PC, the console version may currently be one of the worst ports that I've experienced in a long time. This is unfortunate as I'm sure the overall experience is a good one, but with horrible controller bindings and zero ability to change anything? Or even scroll through to see what the options are at times? It was an arduous adventure. Yes, arduous.

I've gone back and forth over where I should start, but I'll start here. A controller is not a mouse. It should never be treated as a mouse unless, looking at the Switch 2, it can be. That is perhaps one of the biggest issues with YAR as the left thumb stick is used as a mouse pointer in almost all of the menus. The sluggish movement of the cursor makes any menu related task a chore. Having to continuously move the cursor back and forth from the looting box to your inventory is more difficult than any combat. There should have been an auto select function to move the cursor for you if the cursor was going to be kept. Otherwise, it should have been done away with entirely for a more console appropriate interface.

Then there's world exploration. There are no toggle options to run. You constantly have to press down on the left thumb stick while moving around to move faster. There's no easy way to put away your equipment. If your sword, axe, pickaxe, bow, etc come out, you have to open the quick select to put them away. If you have a shield, good luck. The process is even more cumbersome and often doesn't work the first or second time that you try to put them away.

Finally, in combat itself, if you had the misfortune of not having a weapon out while attacked, because you were mining or chopping a tree, you have to make due with whatever you may have in hand. This wasn't so bad in the starting area, but moving to the other areas, the game simply wouldn't let me swap gear often causing me unnecessary damage.

The following is partially questionable design, and part goldfish memory on my part. The world of YAR isn't so big that you need a mini map, but the map itself? There are no indicators. Nothing to tell you where you're standing. No markers for where your quests are. Nothing. There is also no compass available. So being told to head to the West area of “X”? Which way is West…?

This was often made worse by being told to talk to x, y, z person. No makers on the map. No quest markers above their heads. You have to remember who someone is and the relative area they are standing in to continue or complete certain quest lines. It just complicated everything, and when combined all together, an overall unpleasant experience for a lot of aspects that should have been considered basic quality of life aspects.

I know this sounds harsh. That's why after having so many issues, I restarted. I took things slower. Did the issues go away? No. But at least with a few hours of gameplay knowledge to better guide me, the second attempt was a bit more enjoyable where I could see where YAR had good ideas.

Crafting new gear is generally in your hands with materials collected around the world. Leveling up is done via experience points, but new stats have to be taught by the various training masters. The dialog is cheesy and fun. The quests aren't all fetch quests and had some interesting interactions. You also don't always have to do it the hard way, and sometimes? You can skip the manual labour and just pay for what you need to finish up the quest lines.

Unfortunately, due to the poor controller support, it's really hard to recommend YAR: Forgotten Throne in its current state on the PlayStation. If the controller features can be updated, or allow people to modify them, it can easily become a much better experience. 

 

Score: 5 / 10