Godfall

 


Godfall is an action RPG developed by some unknown developer called Counterplay Games who I can barely find any information about online or history of ther previous games..but it is published by Gearbox...oh no..let's see if they managed to keep their grubby little hands off this enough to prevent it from being a shit show. The game has a fully co-op campaign so thats the main reason I picked it up for cheap.

The first impression was promising..although the art style felt really cheap and knock off and generic, like weird Bionicle like armor suit animal warriors with a cheap almost asset-flip vibe about it, the graphics are vibrant and engaging enough. It drops you into some long hour long tutorial where you make your way through a series of arenas trying to show off some of the games mecahnics. At its heart its almost a beat em up button masher kind of game, but its also got a Souls-lite feel to it. It doesn't have manual lock on like Souls games, it has a sort of auto-lock on, its got a dodge button, its got a light attack and heavy attack that you can charge, then you just mash buttons and do different combos almost like a fighting game. It seems alright at first. The graphics sometimes really pop off the screen with really vibrant colors and specular lighting and reflections off the floors and stuff like that, it can create a nice visual but again I cant seem to knock that overly generic, low budget soulless feeling from the game.

After the overly long, kinda boring tutorial, you find yourself in the hub world. This is just a circular room with random NPC's standing around, and some giant blue head girl NPC that you always have to talk to to obtain the next main quest. In the middle of the room you have this mission selection overworld thing, and I'll just mention here that the overall UI of the game is kinda terrible and clunky and confusing. You open your inventory then you have like 10 tabs of shit you can shift through, then you have another 10 Sub-tabs and its kinda just a mess to navigate. Ontop of it, that mission select overworld thing is where you create Co-op parties to invite your friend, and that as well is just a clusterfuck mess. When you finally figure out how to invite your friend to the party, then only the main host can select the missions, although this is confused as well because the co-op partner can look at his own world map but the missions never actually progress like they do for the host. Its a mess. Even worse, when the host has picked a mission, it has to 'search for a server' and do all this shit, and it doesnt even notify the co-op partner that any of this is happening so you just stand around confused at whats going on.

So the whole UI system sucks, what kind of mechanics does the game have though?

Well its got the typical RPG bullshit, its got all sorts of different items you can collect, its got a skill tree, its got these other convuluted bullshit mechanics in the menus you can play with but honestly none of it is interesting at all. Its even got this system where in between missions you can choose from like 20 different characters to swap in and out of, but its all such a mess of mechanics it just never got interesting + they all look stupid and lame. You can swap body suits which grants you slightly different new abilities, but it also resets your skill tree and all your items each time so I said fuck it and just played the default guy the whole game.

The itemization here is bullshit too. I think Gearbox did get their grubby little fingers all over this game because the loot is almost exactly the same as Borderlands. Its got the same colors, it looks the same when its dropped, its the same watered down, meaningless bullshit where items barely have any stats its just "bigger number better" and choosing between Vitality, Spirit, and Might. To make matters worse, you keep automatically picking up gear, you dont even have to press a button to pick it up manually. It feels so meaningless and weightless, you just randomly aquire new items but none of it has any special feeling or excitement about it. To make matters EVEN worse, for whatever stupid fucking reason, the devs thought it was a good idea to bombard the player with all these free, overpowered DLC weapons at the start of the game. So for each level bracket ex; level 0, level 10, level 20, level 25, etc,  you have the choice to just equip an overpowered DLC weapon that completely invalidates all of the loot in the game. I don't think a single weapon ive found was ever better than these free DLC weapons the devs give you. Why the fuck do devs do shit like this? What were they thinking? Am I just supposed to not use it? This is the default experience. This is what they intended. Why would they throw in overpowered weps that basically ruin the entire loot system, whatever semblance there was of one in the first place. Just garbage game design all around.

Now look, with all of this shit in place I could have still said the game was decent or fun or whatever. But quickly into the game we discovered a fatal, mind boggling flaw. Theres literally zero penalty for death. Thats right. If you die, you just fall to the ground, and can respawn RIGHT back where you were, no experience penalty loss, enemies dont loose health, you dont have to re-do anything...you just...respawn..and carry on. That means NOTHING has meaning or importance. The game is now completely trivial and piss easy. You died? no big deal, theres no loss, just wake back up as if nothing happened. What the FUCK were they thinking? Its one thing to ruin the loot system, and make a piece of shit boring loot system in the first place, but to also make the game completely trivial and piss easy with zero death penatly is just completely baffling. I cant wrap my head around it. What the fuck were they smoking? What is WITH this game design? It makes zero fuckin sense. Who hired these people? I bet if you hired random pedestrians off the street they could come up with better game design than this awful pointless crap.

So once we realized theres no penalty for death, we basically wrote off the game. Stopped caring about the story, just equipped the overpowered DLC bullshit, and mindlessly spammed buttons through the rest of the game. Its shit. The game is pointless. Theres barely a game. Theres multiple different boss fights, and it seems like this is these are the only points in the game where death actually does anything. Bosses have brackets in their health bars, and it seems like if you both die at the same time, the boss actually resets to the last health bracket. So what ends up happening during these boss fights is essentailly coordinating your co-op deaths. Like, oh, my buddy died, OK, that means time to run around in a circle and avoid death until he gets back. Thats all it turns into. You just wail on the bosses mindlessly, sometimes dodging it doesnt really matter, then if one of you dies you just run around and wait for him to get back. Repeat until boss dead. Wow. Riviting gameplay. Great design. What a dumbass dev team.

The gameplay structure is largely the same shit, you start in the hub world and choose a mission, then almost every level has the same structure. Its like a bunch of pieced together circular arenas where it spawns enemies and you fight them then progress to next beat em up arena. Except the game is poorly designed because some levels are pieced together from the last so its like you can accidentally run past where youre supposed to go and backtrack throughout all the previous empty level, wasting tons of time doing nothing. There are some levels in particular where the whole artstyle completely changes tone and it becomes all multicolored purple and pink and blue weird shit like Fortnight graphics or something, its just jarring. The graphics are really hit and miss, sometimes it has impressive reflections and lighting, and other times its way oversaturated and cartoony looking and generic.

There is a difficulty select hidden deep in the mission select menu, theres a Hard difficulty which actually has a death penalty something like if you die 3 times it resets the mission. But who is going to play on HARDEST difficulty first playthrough? The game balance is just completely fucked, something that anything Gearbox touches seems to be a common theme.

The game is really simplistic and watered down, but at the same time strangely has too many convuluted mechanics. Like the whole switching between armor characters thing, the skilltree has a bunch of stupid fighting game mechanic things you can learn, or it also has more passive generic things like +10 vitality shit, I just got all the skill tree stuff that sounded totally mindless like +10 to stats and shit. Leveling up never felt rewarding or adding anything new or interesting ,its just an annoying addition to try to do more DPS faster than the enemies wittle your health down to prevent dying over and over corpse rushing the AI.

The game could of had a lot of potential, I think Gearbox being the publisher, probably made all sorts of demands and requested changes left and right from the dev, and thats why the game is designed like total shit and blew it. No death penatly, completely uninteresting loot and combat, all the stats and RPG mechanics feel meaningless and trivial, hit and miss level design graphics, repetitive objectives, arbitrary and stupidly hard to follow story also really cliche, theres just not much to like here beyond being a mindless co-op button masher to play for a few days.

4/10