Godfall – Impressions (PS5)
Backed by Gearbox Publishing and limited time console exclusivity on PS5, Counterplay Games brings us Godfall. First unveiled at the 2019 Game Awards, details and in-depth footage leading up to the release of this third person looter-slasher have been scant. Gamers were predictably nervous that this release could easily fall into the Ryse: Son of Rome and Heavenly Sword category of flashy but shallow console exclusive launch titles. After playing through the first five hours of the game on Sony’s new console, it’s starting to look like that’s just the case despite its exciting combat and next-gen visuals.
We’ll start with Godfall clearly does well. Put simply, its combat is fantastic. By balancing difficulty, weapon depth, parrying and finishing mechanics, the game’s shines with its moment to moment hacking and slashing. Weapons are varied and can be swapped on the fly to deal with different situations. Slow and lumbering enemies can be dealt quick flurries of jabs and slashes from lightning quick dual blades or polearms. Conversely, you can quickly switch to slow and brutal war hammers or longswords to easily smash through smaller and more squishy enemies. Comparing this to a game like Monster Hunter where you’re tied to one fighting style, we loved the amount of flexibility that Godfall offered in its weapon variability. Another surprising touch is your shield. In addition to serving its purpose to block and parry attacks, the shield is also a ranged weapon. It can be thrown at enemies for a momentary stun and can be upgraded for brilliant area of effect attacks.
Adding to this are breaches and takedowns – the former is Godfall‘s equivalent to staggers and the ladder being finishers. Each enemy has above its head two bars – a red health bar showing its life and a yellow showing its breach damage. Regular attacks whittle away at HP while slower heavy attacks, initiated with R2, fill up an enemies breach damage. Once this breach bar is full, a punishing and visually awesome takedown attack can be executed – usually enough to finish off most enemies. As you progress, weapons and abilities can be enhanced to focus on either regular damage or breach damage. This provides added levels of customization and caters to making a character build all your own.
Enemy design is another standout aspect of the game. Each mob of enemies has a nice mix of heavy hitters, ranged annoyances, and weaker mage-like baddies who buff and heal their allies. This varied design ensures that encounters are engaging and require a perfect amount of strategy. This extends to the bosses and mini boss that players will encounter throughout their journey. Each has a unique design and specific weaknesses that took us at least a few deaths to figure out. The rapid weapon swapping made finding the best arsenal of attacks and defensive strategy exhilarating. This all adds up to make Godfall‘s difficulty spot on.
Where Godfall also immediately impresses is in its visuals. As one of only the console exclusive launch titles alongside Demon’s Souls Remake, Godfall puts on a great show for what the next generation can bring in terms of graphics. Vibrant colors, detailed lighting, and silky smooth animation come together to make the game visually stunning. In terms of performance, our play time with the game mostly maintained a solid FPS count with only a few noticeable frame hitches. The game somewhat embellishes the bloom lightning effects in its chrome and golden design elements that some could find obnoxious. There also are minor animation glitches when levelling up mid-combat that were certainly jarring. All in all though, Godfall‘s graphics certainly help it stand out as true next generation title from a visual standpoint.
Godfall allows players to craft an upgrade up to twelve different Valorplates. Each one of these suits of armor have vastly different visual designs as each themes itself after a different animal. Unfortunately, the Valorplates don’t do enough to make each feel different from the other. We were hoping that the each suit would lend itself better to a different playstyle – one focused on tanking while another on DPS or agility. Instead they all play and feel very similar. Valorplates have their own super ability – the Bulwark, as an example, can plant three laser beacons that remain stationary and deal laser damage to enemies for a set amount of time. But these supers were really the only reason we found to experiment with others.
Where the concern starts to mount, however, is in the game’s lack of mission and world depth. The campaign runs players through various missions in Earth, Water and Fire realms. While each of these world’s boast a distinctly different visual design, they are severely lacking in having much more than a skin deep personality. The absence of things like snippets of lore or interesting collectibles limit the lure of exploration to tracking down crafting materials or pieces of loot. Further to this, for as large as these ‘open’ areas seem to sprawl, all of the mission areas really boil down to navigating one corridor after another, occasionally connected by a slightly larger battle area. The realms are largely lifeless save for the roving mobs of enemies that we quickly found ourselves running straight by in order to finish a main objective.
In terms of missions, they all boil down to clearing out an area or killing a named enemy as primary objectives. Bonus rewards are offered for clearing a mission in a set amount of time or performing a certain amount of takedowns for added incentive. While the combat is a saving grace, we would have like to have seen a little bit more variety in what we were doing. As a third person action game, there would have been more than enough room to incorporate platforming elements to change things up.
Endgame consists of a hoarde-mode style Tower of Trials. This has you traverse a never ending elevator higher and higher battling harder enemies with increasingly improved rewards. Further to this is a boss rush mode that introduces a different skill modifier at the beginning of each fight. At the moment, these two modes are really all the end game has to offer. While DLC and new realms have been promised post release, the end game offering doesn’t feel like enough to keep us around after the campaign is cleared. In terms of multiplayer, Godfall can be played solo or with three player coop. A PVP mode is absent on Counterplay games have not unveiled any plans to introduce this to the game in the future.
Following our first five hours with Godfall, we’re looking forward to rounding out the campaign and checking out the end game. The combat has been more than enough to keep us plunging through the games visually impressive but lifeless game world and one dimensional missions. At this point, it would be difficult to recommend the game as a full price purchase. But that could change depending on post launch support and how engaging the end game actually is.
Godfall launched on Playstation 5 and PC on November 12, 2020.
