Cloud Monday - F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch - Part 2 - Frequent Autosaves Might Be Enough

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 2 of playing F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch on PS4, via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

In Part 1, we learned that the game doesn't have manual saves. This is important to know as one of the disadvantages of streaming games from PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service is that we're only given a 20 second warning before disconnection. In Part 2, we got new abilities, weapons, and completed an important mission, and still there was no ability to manually save so i'm sure this game doesn't support that function.

If we can't save manually, then F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch needs to have a robust auto save feature. checkpoints are good for a quick restart in game, but to come back to the game we need autosaves. it seems like F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch uses the auto save as a checkpoint. this means that the auto saves are frequent because the checkpoints are. 

It seems like the auto saves, and therefore the checkpoints, happen before a fighting section, before a boss section, before a puzzle platforming section, and when you use a terminal. In what i've played across both parts, this means that i'm only going a few minutes in-between saves, typically as i travel between one point of interest to another. Whilst this isn't as good as a manual save, it's decent enough for F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch.

Because of how frequent the auto saves are, i'm am not going to dismiss F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch. it doesn't get my highest recommendation as a game to be played from the Cloud, but it sill gets one as it's a good game to stream. i would say that if you're not looking for a challenge and are in it for the story play on "Easy" as i found "Normal" difficulty to be what i'd expect "Hard" to be.

Check out my first look in Part 1.

Part 1: https://youtu.be/BUe8W8tXM88

Cloud Monday - F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch - Part 1 - No Manual Saves

This week's new Cloud Monday video is part 1 of playing F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch on PS4, via the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Service to my Japanese launch model PlayStation 4.

This is a game i've been wanting to try for a while. the artwork of the world looked so good and i've always been curious as to what type of sidescroller it would actually be. But as part of this series, the most important question is going to be how suitable is it as a game being streamed to my #PS4 via the cloud.

The answer so far is that it's not that suitable. that's not a knock against the game for how good it is as a game. this is about how suitable it is and how well adapted it is for the PlayStation Plus Cloud Streaming Platform. The biggest problem F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch has is that there are no manual saves. the biggest issue this platform has is that there is only a 20 second warning before disconnection.

Another potential issue is that the game zooms out quite a lot. the world on screen does look great, there's no issue with the artwork tho the pop-in can be a little distracting. a couple of times in this part the video we're playing gets some macro blocking or stream tears. because the camera is further out and our character on screen is therefore quite small, these disruptions are quite noticeable and do impact gameplay.

As for the game itself, i'm mostly enjoying it. getting around the world is easy and there are a lot of little short cuts and places to check out. the combat is taking a little time to get used to, you'll hear me say more than once that i would like a dodge. as we're early on, i'm still unlocking abilities. as for the story, it's not revealing too much right now but that could be because it feels like we're still in the tutorial first main mission. some things have been teased and i'm looking forward to playing again in Part 2.