Godfall is one of the latest looter games on the market developed by Counterplay Games and published by Gearbox. It’s also one of the first next-gen only games to be released.
As a PS5 and PC-only game, Godfall brings with it a fair number of good things that can give players a clearer picture of what next-gen games have in store for the future. It also has a good number of awful things that will really make players fear for what the future of next-gen gaming has to offer. This list will go over just a few of those things, both good and bad.
10 Best: The Graphics
One of the most impressive things about Godfall is its visuals. It certainly has a lot of eye candy to marvel at.
Even if the realms themselves are a little samey and repetitive, the game’s art team knocked it out of the park with some of the details put into the aesthetics of them. The game’s combat has a metric-ton of particle effects that fill the screen and practically blind the player’s eyes with shiny flashes of light. It is nothing short of a spectacle when the action ramps up, sparks start flying, and the player explodes enemies into a blue-ish-green mist.
9 Worst: The System Requirements
For such a visually beefy game, it, of course, has to have system requirements that reflect this on PC.
A GTX 1060 or an RX 580 is just the minimum graphics card requirements. A far cry from other current games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077—whenever that comes out—who’s recommended specs are both around the GTX 1060/RX 580 ranges. For Godfall’s recommended specs, the player will be needing at least an RX 5700 XT or a GTX 1080 Ti. Sizably beefy cards with just as beefy prices currently attached to them.
8 Best: Valorplates
In Godfall, the player can switch between armor sets called valorplates. They are essentially like Warframe’s, well, warframes. While the name of them isn’t nearly as cool as warframe, valorplates give the player character different base stats and abilities unique to the valorplate.
Being able to kit-out each valorplate differently from another gives the player a good host of options to switch between, like loadouts. While it is a bummer that gear items don’t really change the look of valorplates, (no doubt what the obligatory cosmetic option is for…) it is a nice touch that each valorplate is distinctly male or female and gives the player character the corresponding male/female voice during cutscenes.
7 Worst: The Grind
It seems like more and more games these days need to keep shoving in needless looter mechanics into them. Godfall is certainly no exception.
Looter mechanics are turning into an excuse for games that offer thousands of hours of content when only a minute portion of that content is actually worthwhile. Godfall is incredibly grindy and repetitive. The player is either killing constantly respawning enemies or doing very boring bonus objectives that usually involves a “puzzle” to unlock a chest of some kind. If the player isn’t doing that, then they’re participating in the game’s very mundane collect-a-thon campaign missions or fighting a boss.
6 Best: Skill Tree
Godfall has a skill tree that works like a web. Purchase one skill with a skill point and the skills adjacent to the one purchased become available.
Normally, this kind of system could lock the player into a set of skills they may not want or feel are no longer essential to their current playstyle. The saving grace for Godfall, though, is that the player can redo the skill tree whenever they want. This allows the player to create an entirely different web of skills at their leisure and find a combination that efficiently suits them.
5 Worst: The Spam
The biggest downfall of the game’s combat is the excessive amounts of spam it tends to throw at the player. During campaign missions, levels are sparse of enemies. Once the primary objective is complete, though, is when the game really turns up the heat.
That’s when the game starts throwing more ranged enemies at the player, more enemies with super-armored attacks, and can often cancel their hit-stun while the player is mid-string. Combat encounters that randomly spawn in more enemies out of nowhere. Enemy levels also jump up to meet the player’s if the initial mission they completed was a lower level than their own, which means they’re doing more damage. To top it off, even though most ranged attacks don’t hit-stun you, they chip away at the player’s health very fast, which is just as annoying.
4 Best: Weapon Types
One thing that deserves a lot of credit is the different types of weapons in the game. Even though there are only five weapon types, they all feel very unique from each other.
A longsword feels very balanced in speed in range while dual blades are faster but have very limited range. A slow but powerful war hammer feels very different from the more agile and technical polearm. While the damage types that each weapon can feature are pretty negligible for the most part, how each weapon handles is something that can easily and organically be incorporated into an individual player’s playstyle.
3 Worst: The Bugs
It’s 2020 and the buggy launches of games just keep on coming. Aside from the optimization issues for the game on PC, there’s been reports of movement bugs, item stats that should significantly change gameplay having no effect on it and aren’t being reflected in the player character’s overall stats, as well as game-breaking bugs like invincible bosses and players being unable to progress in missions without having to restart.
It’s all in the Reddit megathread as well as videos. This whole ‘it’s good enough, we’ll fix it later’ attitude, that a lot of games are adopting these days is just downright sad at this point.
2 Best: Augments
Godfall features two types of gear items: basic gear items such as the standard rings, weapons, and gems and a special kind called augments. Augments function mostly like the standard items with stats that affect the player character’s overall power depending on the type as well as offer perks but they’re also equipped to special slots that have unique combinations between each valorplate.
Augments are probably the one piece of gear that’s worth keeping to some capacity after picking up. They don’t drop as often as other gear types. Different valorplates also have different slot combinations with a power drain system. This forces the player to be as efficient as possible with any combination and means that any augment might be useful at some point or another if the player is one that likes to experiment a lot.
1 Worst: The Campaign
Easily the worst part about Godfall is the campaign. It’s, essentially, nonexistent. The game, more or less, revolves around a war story where brother goes against brother. This is a fine set-up, but all that amounts to in-game is the player running around a couple of barren maps killing enemies and collecting an arbitrary number of sigils to unlock the boss. Rinse, repeat for three realms until the player fights the final boss, and then they’re thrown into the very thoughtless endgame loop.
The player character has a total of two allies in-game. A celestial talking head and a weaponsmith. Where’s the army, or at the very least, the resistance force for the protagonist? Where are all details that make the world feel like it doesn’t just revolve around the player? This is basic world-building 101, and, no, little bits of shallow lore attached to pieces of gear don’t count. This isn’t Dark Souls. The game’s campaign utterly fails at making it seem as though anything is really at stake besides just stopping the bad dude from becoming a god.
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