All Shine. No Shimmer
Godfall promised to bring eye popping visuals and addictive and rich gameplay exclusively to the PlayStation 5 as a launch title. Godfall certainly delivers in the looks department with jaw dropping detail and face melting particle effects as far as the eyes can see, but Godfall fails in creating an interesting world to explore. Shallow side quests, paint by numbers storytelling, and an uninspired Valor Plate system makes the loot grind come to a screeching halt.
Godfall is a game fans of action RPGs and looters should fall in love with. It has loot galore for you to swap out and increase your stats as you fight waves of respawning baddies. It feels like Diablo in its gameplay loop, but unfortunately falls on its face in the actual combat department. There is plenty of variety in combat, with each of the weapon types bringing their own style to the battlefield. The weapons feel as they should, with massive hammers and swords having plenty of weight, but there are staggeringly stubborn design choices to the combat that hold it back from truly feeling great. With all that being said, the “lock-on” system is paltry. Orin’s attacks are all based on where your center dot is on the screen. When you click in R3 to lock on, you have to have this dot on the enemy you want to lock onto. With the camera so close to you and enemies everywhere, it seems counter-intuitive to have to aim my lock-on rather than it simply snapping to the nearest enemy. Couple this with the inability to que up actions and stop your swings when you need to and you get a real mess in the combat department. The game LOOKS like it wants to be a Souls-lite in its combat, but doesn’t go the whole mile and it suffers for it. Your Orin just ends up swinging wildly and thrashing about. This is a shame because the different attacks and abilities in theory should be a blast to experiment with.
The best parts of the combat are the different abilities you unlock in the skill tree. From Captain America-like shield tosses to quick-turn knife tosses (anything other than a toss for the second one?), it is a ton of fun to see how these all play together. I wish the same could be said for the seemingly thrown together Valor Plate system.
Throughout your playthrough you are asked to harvest some resources which you will use to craft the Valor Plates. These plates look beautiful, but are generally useless. You get slight elemental bonuses, standard to most weapons in the game, along some special attacks, but they all seem so similar to each other you might as well just pick the one that looks the coolest and go on your way. If you are looking for some cool powers connected to the suit unlocks like, say, Spider-Man, you will be disappointed.
The loot grind is somewhat decent as far as finding items that increase that magical number is concerned, but again this is hampered by baffling design choices when it comes to item management. When you want to check out the items you picked up, you go to your inventory. Seems simple enough. Want to equip those items? Too bad. You have to go to your equipment tab and pick from there. Why these can’t be on the same page is confounding. Luckily, you can dismantle whatever items you want from the inventory so you don’t have a tough time with over encumbrance. These strange inconsistencies in basic features adds up to make the experience a disjointed one.
Godfall does a good job at looking next gen, but does a terrible job at being a world you would want to revisit every day like Diablo or Destiny. Side quests amount to finding hidden treasure and that is about it. The main quest is defeating waves and then a boss and that’s about it. Boring corridor level design that never truly feels different holds players back from wanting to scratch the loot grinding itch. This may be a nice showcase for next gen power, but it certainly isn’t worth the price of admission to do so. If this goes free-to-play or you can play a friends place, give it a shot.
