NOt entirely god(aw)Fall.
Godfall is exactly how I remember most launch games being for new hardware; an incredibly basic premise, visually striking, but dramatically shallow. That said, Godfall still does a lot right, offering a fairly enjoyable 10-15 hour experience while it lasts, but its story and world did absolutely nothing to keep me engaged on even a basic narrative level. The game sells itself off as being a looter-slasher, apparently considering itself the “first of its kind.” but fails to take into account the 400 other games that have done the exact same thing. Hell, the game even feels like a simply better-looking version of Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom, another “looter-slasher” game that launched aside Sony hardware, if only some 14 years ago.
Godfall attempts to set the stage for a compelling story between two warring brothers, but it comes off as if the game is trying to summarize the first 100 pages of an epic fantasy novel in less than five minutes, plunking you down at the start of the game at page 101 and hoping you got what you needed out of that brief opening cutscene. Essentially, you have a brother named Macros, who you only see during the game’s opening moments and then at the end when the two of you square off in a less than spectacular battle. Macros has a bit of a god complex, a ritual to become one, and you are thrown to what is your apparent death, only to survive and plot a story of revenge. The game has you putting an end to the ritual by simply trying to beat him to it, only discovering your efforts have led him to take more drastic measures. Now, that journey is padded with you taking down several of his personal guards; bosses that essentially stand in your way to getting your revenge. The game’s story is set up in a way where your goal is always to defeat enemies, and that’s about it. All style and no substance is this game’s M.O.
When it comes to the overall story quality, there are no twists, turns, or exciting moments for the story or the game to shine. It is as basic as you get, with an ending that leaves a lot to be desired. Now, it’s made clear what happens, but the game places you back into your hub location immediately after the final battle occurs without honoring what just happened. You’ll have a few endgame activities in the forms of Dreamstones and a Roguelike challenge tower to take part in, which I’ll talk about later, but the story’s conclusion is never spoken of again. In fact, it’s almost as if it places you back before the events of the conclusion. It’s an odd disconnect that felt wasteful in what happened and causes the ending to be a massive and shallow disappointment.
Now, the game built around the story is still enjoyable, with a pretty deep combat system and some gorgeous locations, environments that are shiny and bright and while are a bit simplistic in their layout, still manages to offer up a visually pleasing experience. In Godfall, you only have three environments to explore, the realms of Earth, Water, and Air. The fire realm is mentioned several times and its boss surprisingly makes an appearance in another realm, which to me concludes that the realm was likely cut for launch, as was the fifth and final realm talked about during the game’s development. Each realm is spacious enough, filled with various connecting paths, but eventually, you’ll see everything each location has to offer in just a few missions. Each level operates the same way as there isn’t some sort of mechanic exclusive to each location, apart from visual changes to some of the resources you’ll gather being native to that environment.
The game’s missions will take you to each of these three locales, but the questing doesn’t have to end when your task is complete. You can stay in each realm and explore, solving a series of pretty basic puzzles to unlock chests filled with loot, or just getting a feel for the level. You can freely explore the realm across a series of missions, from defeating various mini-bosses to just exploring the realm without any reason other than to just grind out gear, earn a variety of resources, or work on your leveling. While you cannot freely jump, you can warp from platform to platform, as long as there is a phase node present, or leap over small gaps or mantle up mountable ledges with the O button.
You play as Orin, the fallen king, and brother of Macros, set in his path to take his throne back. You’ll start your adventure with two of your guards at your side, and apart from one late-game moment, I can’t recall another time you see either of them again. Now, if I was in charge of this game, I would have placed the opening level as when you are pulled from the waters below your fall from these two, aiding in building up to the point where the game begins and allowing them to become fully realized characters other than a few forgettable voices to start the game off with. You’ll eventually gain the aid of the Seventh Sanctum, an entity that is not really explained to you unless you dive into the codex entries you can unlock. See, the Sanctums were built to be archives for the history and culture of the realm, and several of them were destroyed in the war between Orin and Macros. The Seventh is the only one that still stands, albeit locked away by the two brothers. During the entire game, she acts like mission control for Orin, detailing much of the story and setting in motion the quests we’ll go on.
The only other character that you’ll interact with from an NPC level is Zenun Earthminder, a godsmith that helps you spark the forge to upgrade and improve your overall weaponry. Now, the game falls into a narrative trap with these two as you’ll often finish a mission, talk with them each once, and then head right back out. This happens between every mission like clockwork and starts to become a tad bit tedious. Other than serving their purpose for granting you missions and boosting your items, they lack pretty much anything apart from being a means to an end.
Even Orin himself is rarely engaging and comes off as a means to dive into combat, and we are never treated to anything that makes us compelled to see his story through. Was Orin a good king, is he even a good person? There are tiny shards of who he was here but the game rarely allows us to even grasp what sort of person he was, or even is at this point. Hell, apart from an incredibly brief moment in the opening moments, we don’t get to explore his kingdom, see his people, or even get a glance of what we are trying to save. If we ever get a Godfall 2, the story needs to dive into this world and what you’re protecting in order to make me truly care about this possible franchise.
Between each mission, you’ll visit the Sanctum, a location hub where the Seventh Sanctum presides. And, unless it is just for its symmetrical design, there are two doors that do not open at the top of the stairs, the third of which offers a training room for you to test out new weapons and abilities. It’s likely these doors are reserved for future content, or again, they just might be there for design. The Sanctum is where you’ll also store your Valorplates, armors that feel almost ripped from Warframe in a great deal of their design. Hell, there are times where the gameplay itself feels drastically similar to Digital Extreme’s popular online shooter. You’ll spend a series of earnable resources to earn those plates, even if it’s a bit odd that they are physically in front of you, yet unable to be worn. Each Valorplate has a few key abilities that differentiate them but come off more as palette swaps than anything significant. Each armor plate has the ability to cause a status effect, a special move, and various status buffs when that move is active.
When wearing the Valorplates, there are no changes to armor, health, or anything else unless the armor itself has a bonus that reflects one of those attributes. Now, each armor set can cause various status effects like chill, ignite, curse, or whathaveyou, but these all simply deplete enemies’ health in much the same way and therefore act too similar to really feel different. Some Valorplates offer up more variety in either added armor or having Soulshatter build up faster, a combat mechanic that has enemies explode with a sound effect in which I can’t stop hearing a dolphin cry. When it comes to picking your Valorplate, it comes more in either you find a certain stat to track better with your playstyle, that you like how their special move operates, or simply based off their look. The game does offer up some sizable challenge in some of its encounters, but since each plate is more or less the same, there is no best one to choose or that special set that provides an easy win.
Now, similarities across the Valorplates aside, there are still ways to create custom builds as the game has a variety of skills that you can sink points into. Each skill can be further leveled up to a point, increasing the stats a bit at a time, sometimes even adding in new abilities or moves. In fact, some optional mission objectives may request you to perform a move you haven’t even unlocked yet, forcing you in some ways to slot points into that skill for the fear of missing out on certain quest rewards. These skills have you increasing your vitality, critical hit chance, resistance to certain ailments, siphoning health to unlocking the ability to throw your shield, pinging it off enemies in a variety of ways. You can refund points or reset points entirely, allowing you to create builds on the fly should you be struggling with certain bosses or challenges. The secondary way to get a bit of variety out of your Valorplate is through augments that are tailored towards different assortments of nodes that concentrate on different stats. You’ll unlock new Augments, gain access to additional slots as you continue to play, and while this is a somewhat interesting way to make the Valorplates stand out from one another, it feels lukewarm at best.
Combat is certainly the high point of what Godfall offers, and in a game that is built almost entirely around it, that’s something you really want to be good. Thankfully, the combat is as deep as you want to explore with it, offering a wide range of combat actions. Combat is based around techniques, a northern and southern set. Northern attacks convert some of the enemy’s health to what is called Soulshatter buildup, a chunk of health that can be destroyed with the use of a Southern technique, causing the enemy to explode when it depletes the remaining allotment of their health. Enemies also have weak points, that can be targeted for additional damage as well as takedown strikes that operate almost like a finishing move. If the enemy has low enough health, the takedown can quite easily defeat them outright. Much of the game is built around that Soulshatter technique, which is affected by light attacks and your heavy attacks then depleting that Soulshatter buildup. As you continue to attack, you can buildup rampage, a 20% bonus to your attack as long as you continue to lay into nearby enemies. Stop hitting enemies for around 10 seconds and your rampage bonus goes away.
One aspect of combat that is very interesting is your polarity attacks. Once you’ve built up enough energy with your other equipped weapon, swapping to it will cause it to emit a shockwave that damages nearby enemies while simultaneously increasing that weapon’s damage. I did this a lot with my giant hammers as the shockwave would stagger the enemies for just the right amount of time to get in a few quick swings or some of the bigger more hard-hitting special attacks. It’s a great system that rewards sticking with a main weapon and strategically then bringing your reserved secondary into combat at just the right moment. Each Valorplate has a special attack called an Archon’s Fury These range in function and as you perform these attacks, your health is increased, and any damage you take is converted instead to the amount of time your attack has left, making you pretty much invincible for at least a few precious seconds.
Each Valorplate can use any weapon, as neither of them excel in any particular field. You’ll have longswords, greatswords, hammers, dual blades, polearms, that all vary in speed, range, and a variety of different primary and secondary effects. Each weapon has a name and some lore attached to it, but since the gear is so random, it lacks a lot of personality There are no fancy unique weapons that I’ve encountered, and frankly, I don’t know if I kept to a single weapon terribly long as I just kept finding better stuff. The amount of loot you receive is decent enough and becomes a much bigger focus when you reach endgame and desperately need to min-max more and more as the challenges get greater. You can equip two weapons at a time, swapping really whenever you want, and as you upgrade them, they gain more stats, better buffs, and become drastically more powerful as you sink more points into certain skills.
While you cannot change a Valorplate’s overall look, you’ll find a huge variety of items that you can equip, from new weapons, amulets, charms, rings, life stones, and banners. While the trinkets you equip are more or less the same sort of object that boosts certain stats, everything in the game can be upgraded as well, consuming a wide range of resources that you’ll find out in the world, or by breaking down your old gear. The upgrade system allows you to not just make the effects better, but upgrade the rank of the item as well. Each rank is represented by colors, which is your typical system that showcases the different tiers. Again, while Godfall attempts to mention it is the first looter-slasher, it never does anything unique in that regard, borrowing systems and mechanics from the hundreds, if not thousands, of looter-slashers that have come before it.
Now, while I won’t dive into the types of resources that you’ll need to get the most out of the upgrade system, some of the costs can far outway the desire to really use it in ways that I feel the developer was wanting. While your path to the endgame is easy enough with little need to really become a master of the forge, the endgame challenges themselves really want you to upgrade your weapons to simply just survive. The problem is that the costs to upgrade a lot of the best gear is often ridiculous, causing you to grind away at levels for hours to just upgrade one or two items, to say nothing of the costs you’ll need to pay to access the Dreamstone challenges themselves. One of the most common resources is Electrum, and you’ll spend this each time you want to enter each Dreamstone. If you don’t have enough, you’ll need to go grind to get more. This endgame challenge is how’ll you’ll unlock the same Valorplate that Macros uses as you’ll need to earn Orb’s of Oblivion to do so. It is here where you’ll also acquire the Orb of Creation and Eternity that is used to upgrade high-level gear.
Dreamstones are essentially randomized encounters that take place in the same worlds with variations on many of the same bosses you’ve already beaten time and time again. Each Dreamstone will have branching paths that you can take to earn a variety of different rewards across its three rounds per Dreamstone. The first two challenges allow you to learn information about what modifiers the boss uses to give you a leg up on when you challenge them. You’ll also earn a boon that will be presented to your character that lasts the length of the current Dreamstone. These fights are more challenging than what they were during the story, even with much better gear, but it’s unfortunate that this mode didn’t feature new locations or new bosses to challenge, at least from the Dreamstones that I’ve pushed through. It’s a solid concept on paper, but its execution of replaying much of the same content over and over again for largely replaceable gear is just lacking. Had Dreamstones offered a wealth of new Valorplates, or new locations to visit, then maybe I would find them more engaging, but the gear in Godfall is just not memorable or exciting to keep grinding away at.
The last bit of Endgame content is the Tower of Trials, which is a roguelike challenge mode that has you moving up levels in a tower, earning you new loot as you progress. As the game is also built for co-op, this mode is made far more fun when you are playing with friends, but counting on them having not only a PS5 but a copy of Godfall as well, can be an almost impossible request due to the console still being difficult to track down. It’s also bizarre that Godfall doesn’t feature any sort of matchmaking at all, making co-op an annoyance of tracking down random people to enjoy it with. As you keep pushing through the tower, you’ll earn boons and rewards that will keep you in the fight longer as you attempt to survive the higher you go. As you complete the combat in the elevator platform, you’ll be able to access doors that offer a reward, giving you a slight choice on your loot progress. It’s a solid enough mode, but just like the Dreamstones, you’re simply pushing through a lot of repetitive areas again and the lack of matchmaking for these modes is unfortunate.
Now that said, I don’t want to make it come across that the lack of new content in the endgame is a massive disappointment because that’s only half the story. The new gear and items you're tracking down and earning can still make the gameplay loop fairly enjoyable, especially if you’re rampaging around with friends, it’s just a shame that these areas don’t feel new and unique from what you’ve pushed through already in the story. While Godfall is not a typical live service title, it does mimic a lot of the design of one, complete with more content being added as the game goes on, and the ability to push through this content with friends.
Lastly, for a game being as gorgeous as Godfall can be, taking in-motion screenshots is a drag due to the fact the game does not pause the action when you take screenshots with the PS5’s create button. Unlike Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the game just keeps playing, making the act of taking screenshots of combat a very messy and blurry affair, as you can see below. I rarely want to use someone else’s or publisher-provided pictures, unless requested, and usually want to rely on screenshots I myself have taken, often showcasing the game how it is other than screenshots that have been staged to make the game feel like something it is not. It’s a shame that a game right out of the gate for the PS5 doesn’t showcase the create features as well as it should.
Godfall is more or less exactly what I expected it to be based on the conversation surrounding the game at launch and what we typically get out of launch games; all style and no substance. Now, that’s not true for many games that have launched alongside the PS5, but for Godfall, this is exactly what it is. It’s certainly a gorgeous game with some very flexible combat, but the lack of gameplay variety in the Valorplates, the generic and unimpressive gear, as well as a story that can be written out in its entirety on a napkin, is barely enough for this game to really stand out. There is certainly a solid few hours of enjoyment here, but it just feels like a fairly hollow experience when you take in everything it attempts to offer. If Godfall wants to be a successful franchise, it needs to offer up a compelling narrative, give us deeper gameplay reasons to grind away to unlock new Valorplates, and make the loot feel special in the ways that Destiny has done with a lot of ifs weaponry. There is a solid game structure here to what the developer has crafted here, but it’s just not a game I see remaining in the conversation long.
Developer - Counterplay Games Publisher - Gearbox Publishing Released - November 12th, 2020 Available On - PS5, Windows PC. Rated - (T) Animated Blood, Violence. Platform Reviewed - PlayStation 5 Review Access - Godfall was purchased by the reviewer.