Gods Will Fall Review

What do you do if all of your local omnipotent and omnipresent deities are being unfair and downright mean to you? If your answer is to pile an army of people into boats and try to assault the island that houses all of these gods, you may want to rethink that idea because these godly folks already know what you are planning and can control the weather. Being out on the open sea is probably not a great place to be when you piss off a god, and they’ll toss you around like a rubber duck in a bath tub, leaving very few of your cohorts left breathing.

This is the basic premise of Gods Will Fall. People are unhappy with their gods and, in this case, rightfully so as their gods are a mean bunch of deities, and the people want to overthrow them. As to be expected, it doesn’t end well for the people.

Gods Will Fall Review – Lonely Dungeons

The gameplay opens up as eight survivors swim to the shore of the island of the gods. The game randomly generates eight characters each time you start a new game and the characters range from tank like, heavy set folks with heavy hammers or axes, to smaller and skinnier folks with spears, swords, or a club or axe in each hand. The island consists of one tutorial dungeon and ten boss dungeons, all of which must be traversed using one character at a time. Each character has their own strengths and weaknesses, and each dungeon has a character that should be best suited for it, and through some storytelling, the game sometimes nudges you towards a character or possibly away from one. Ultimately it’s up to you which one you choose to work with.

Once inside a dungeon, you’ll have to work your way through it using one character at a time and a simplistic combat system with basic weapons. You have a light attack, a heavy attack, dodge, jump, and parry. Mastering the parry system is paramount to working through each dungeon, as each successful parry gives you a ton of blood fury, which in turn can be used to replenish your health if needed. For every bad guy you take out, the dungeon’s end boss loses a little bit of life and makes the final battle for that dungeon a little bit easier. If you do run out of health or fall off a cliff or bridge, you not only fail the dungeon, but everything in that dungeon is reset and you’ll have to start over from scratch using a different character. Losing all of your progress after spending thirty minutes taking out a bunch of bad guys and/or critters can get frustrating fast, especially if it was because of a small misstep or gap you didn’t realize needed jumping over.

Gods Will Fall Review – Interesting Bosses but a Tedious Journey

While the story for the game is well written, with little bits of info here and there while figuring out who to send into a dungeon, the game becomes tedious after a couple of hours of rinsing and repeating. Finishing a dungeon gives you stronger equipment, and can save some of your lost buddies if they failed the dungeon previously, but even with the variety of dungeon designs, the combat starts to feel tedious, with a strong emphasis on timing those parrying moves. After failing a harder dungeon a couple of times, I found myself rushing to the end boss simply because I didn’t want to spend another twenty or thirty minutes in the same area hunting down the same dungeon minions again. A checkpoint system of sorts would have been nice, or at the least just let me run past the corpses of the dead I had already vanquished and don’t frustratingly resurrect them.

There is no save system in-game, and if you come across a dungeon you aren’t ready for, there’s a chance you’ll lose all of your characters and have to start over from the beginning of the game. I strongly suggest using either your PS+ cloud save system or a USB drive to copy the game save to in order to save your progress just in case you bite off more than you can chew. Permadeath sucks and you only have eight characters at your disposal to start with. The only way to really know which dungeons are the toughest is by jumping into them, and it’s trial and error with some real in-game consequences.

Gods Will Fall Review – Simplistic Level Design

The simplistic level design and combat system gave the game a mobile like feel to it and I could see the game working well on your Android or iPhone. The isometric view for gameplay is reminiscent of Diablo III or Warhammer: Chaosbane, but that’s where any resemblance stops. Gods Will Fall lacks the depth of the weaponry and armor systems that can make a character unique and powerful and lacks the intricate dungeon designs that can be found in other isometric dungeon crawlers. While this game doesn’t always use a linear path from start to finish, there aren’t too many twists and turns to keep you guessing, so at least not having a dungeon map at your disposal isn’t exactly a bad thing. It’s just generally not needed.

Boss battles are where the game can shine a little bit. Recognizing the attack pattern of a boss becomes the key to defeating them, just try to see it before you die or you’ll have to fight through all of those minions again to get back there. Whether it’s a huge spider or a god in a bath tub, the boss battles were my favorite part of the game, it just wasn’t always fun getting back after failing. Once you defeat a boss and complete a dungeon, there is no replayabilty for it, so completing the game means you are done. There’s no replayabilty, no end game leaderboards or speed runs to try. This seems like a missed opportunity as I wouldn’t mind maybe going after a boss again with a different character, I just wouldn’t want to muck all the way through the dungeon again.

Developer Clever Beans started with a great idea in Gods Will Fall, it just doesn’t seem like they fully worked it out. The game could have been more than what it is, and right now it just felt like a simplistic dungeon crawler that would feel right at home on a mobile device. It played well, it looked fine, it just could have been much more.

Gods Will Fall review code provided by publisher. For more information on scoring please see our Review Policy.