Forsaken

Forsaken on PlayStation is a fast, claustrophobic first-person shooter that puts you in the cockpit of an anti-gravity pioncycle and lets you move through every axis of its ruined world. Probe Entertainment's 1998 game takes place after a disastrous scientific experiment tears Earth apart in the year 2113. The planet is a lifeless, irradiated wreck, yet its abandoned military sites, refineries, reactors and other installations still hold valuables. As one of the mercenaries drawn to the condemned Terran system, you enter the wreckage to loot what remains while automated defenses and rival scavengers try to stop you.

The PlayStation version makes its strongest impression through movement. This is not a shooter built around a floor and a horizon: your bike can accelerate forward and backward, turn, pitch, strafe up, down, left and right, and roll in either direction. Tunnels become chambers, chambers become traps, and a threat can arrive from behind, below or above. The game includes auto-leveling to help keep the bike aligned with the surrounding surfaces, but it can be switched off for players who want complete freedom to fly upside down and attack from unexpected angles.

Every mission begins with a briefing that lays out its own requirements, so survival is only part of the job. Some routes demand that you reach an exit, while the journey through the shattered structures is crowded with turrets, ground machines, airborne drones, ambushes and environmental dangers. The campaign gives the player five lives to start with, and its four settings—Easy, Normal, Hard and Total Mayhem—make the escalating pressure suitable for either a first reconnaissance flight or a much harsher return trip. Passwords let you resume progress after reaching the appropriate points.

Combat is built around collecting and managing a varied arsenal. Primary weapons include the dependable Pulsar, the chargeable Trojax, the spread-firing Suss-Gun, the close-range Pyrolite and the wall-bouncing Transpulse; each can become more potent with power pods. Secondary weapons bring missiles and traps into the mix, from the weapon-stripping Scatter Missile and rapid-fire MFRL to the tracking Solaris, devastating Titan and gravity-warping Gravgon. Mines, orbiting weapon pods, shields, temporary stealth, invulnerability and nitro boosts turn an ordinary flight through a corridor into a constant choice between offense, escape and positioning.

Forsaken also rewards looking at the environment as more than scenery. The manual encourages players to blast suspicious doors and surfaces, hunt for concealed routes and keep moving rather than trade shots in one place. Gold bars can grant extra lives in single-player, while ammunition and power-ups left behind after destruction create a reason to revisit a dangerous area. That blend of maze navigation, hunting for supplies and sudden close-quarters firefights gives the PlayStation game its tense, mechanical rhythm.

For local competition, the PlayStation release supports a two-player split-screen Death Match on one console and monitor. Both players can configure their bikes, and matches can be set with a time limit or a kill target. It is a more focused multiplayer offering than the contemporary PC version, which supported larger networked games, and the Nintendo 64 port, Forsaken 64, which offered four-player split-screen play. The PlayStation edition is still recognizably the same zero-gravity shooter, but its two-player mode and console setup make it a distinct way to experience its arena combat.

Compared with the PC and Nintendo 64 releases, the PlayStation bike is notably slower, which makes evasive flying and lining up shots feel different. Its analog option helps with the demanding controls, while the colored lighting, explosive effects and oppressive industrial spaces preserve the game's late-1990s science-fiction atmosphere. Forsaken is best approached as a demanding 3D action game: learn the controls, use every direction available, and turn the planet's collapsing corridors into an advantage before another scavenger does.