Godfall

Gearbox is a major game development company in the gaming industry and has brought us classic titles and epic franchises over the years. From Borderlands to Duke Nukem Gearbox Software has shown countless times over the quality of great games, however, their latest entry Godfall landed itself in an odd predicament due to the great potential but not so great release. While the gameplay itself is very solid, it overall lacks in some important areas that are crucial for the genre. Godfall is an action role-playing game that they published, and Counterplay Games developed. The game is available on Playstation 5 and PC.

The story follows Orin, a fallen warrior who wants to prevent his evil brother Macros from ascending to become a God. You fight his generals and other various creatures and warriors to take down his army, essentially keeping him from destroying the world. You land in different realms from the seventh sanctum, which is a living entity that allows you to transport to different locations and helps you along your journey.

The story does not give you much content, unfortunately, but it is fairly straightforward. The worlds are breathtaking in design with each one giving you various decent-sized areas that you can free roam in though you are stuck to somewhat linear pathways. The world aside from different enemies has different chests and materials you can collect to upgrade your armor. There are not many enemies, but they are unique in each design. They also have a boss world boss for story purposes and smaller bosses you can return to grind for side missions. One of the issues with this is the fact that the story missions only provide a few and they are the same. You will find yourself grinding the same missions over and over to gain the materials you need to upgrade. So while the design is beautiful, the lack of content kills your interest over time. The overall story itself is also very short, and you feel as you get closer to the end that there is not much to do at all even at the end game. It almost feels as if the developers had a great idea, but ran out of steam halfway through making the game.

What I loved about this game is the combat and gear that you can get for your character. You are not provided character classes, but you can pick and choose your build by the game allowing you limitless options in weapon choices. You can equip 2 weapons at a time, and the game is filled with longswords, hammers, daggers, polearms, and more. You can run a fast-paced build to rack up small but fast damage or go for slow massive hits with a tank-like build. Even the shield provides fun combat with satisfying parries and throws to stun enemies for a critical blow. You also get a massive skill tree that you unlock over time. You can build up your might or critical damage, or choose to focus on unlocking abilities for your individual weapons. The combat is the best part of this game hands down, and it feels so much like God of War with a bit more style. One other honorable mention is the ability to upgrade your individual gear and weapons. The upgrading part is easy, but just requires a bit of grind late game. A lot of reviews complained about the amount of grinding, but this is not the case. The problem is the content when it comes to the game that gets so repetitive causing it to feel like endless grinding. The game requires material like any other RPG to upgrade gear, the only issue is the low amount of side quests to do it. While the maps will show you a free roam option or world bosses, after you beat them they remain repeatable rather than giving you something new.

Overall the performance was good on console. There were little to no frame rate issues and no crashes to be reported. The button mapping was well designed, and the combat and exploration felt natural and smooth. There is a coop feature, but for what little content there is it has not been popular. The differences in-game difficulty from easy to hard were not that much of a gap. There was one pretty exploitable ability in the game known as soul shatter, which melted enemies away in seconds despite the difficulty. While different weapons have different status effects like poison or shock, soul shatter was a different beast. Essentially it would apply the ability to the enemy’s health bar allowing you to build up light attack damage, and then with one heavy attack, the health bar would go down by a massive chunk. One other minor complaint I have is the game gives way too big of a cushion to players. In the rare instance that you die from a boss, the damage stays on and you revive will full health and max lifestones.

This game is not bad by any means, it just needs content plain and simple. There is a lot of potential for the game with the smooth and stylish combat, and breathtaking scenery. Unfortunately with any action RPG you need side quests, you need more to the story missions, and you need more to the exploration. Because of the design, the game feels boring after playing for a while and almost feels linear. I still recommend a playthrough for ARPG lovers and players that want a quick and fun game to run through. I do hope the developer adds more content end game for everyone to get something more after spending 69.99 USD. For players planning to buy this game, I highly recommend you wait for a sale to buy this. It is not worth its full price but is worth around 40 dollars in my opinion.

DVS Score: 6/10