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.
Updated February 3rd, 2022 by Matthew Mckeown: Before it came out, Godfall was going to be the next-gen darling that everyone would line up around the block to get. All that ray tracing, particle effect goodness promised unparalleled beauty and bombastic set pieces that would cement its place in the next generation of consoles. Then it released, and it turns out it’s less delicious warm cake, more tepid room temperature marmite as it garnered a rather mixed to mostly negative reception, sitting on an average 61 on Metacritic.
From issues with the combat, the repetitive grind, a story that’s hidden behind in-game codex text, and a difficulty curve that rivaled the cliffs of Everest in its steepness, Godfall had a rough start. Subsequent patches have ironed out a lot of the kinks and there are some good things going for it, like the Challenger Edition which bypasses the story and skips directly to the endgame content. So if you’ve ever had an inkling of interest in Godfall but are still on the fence, here are a few of the good and bad things about it.
15 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.
14 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 requirement’s. 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.
13 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 load-outs. 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.
12 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.
11 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.
10 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.
9 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 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 pole-arm. 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 play style.
8 Worst: The Bugs
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.
7 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.
6 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.
5 Best: There Is Co-Op
Godfall is fun on your own, but bringing along some buddies can take the edge off the grind a little, and thankfully Godfall does have multiplayer, so you can drag your mates through the misery with you. The game allows up to three people to simultaneously go on an adventure together, so if you’re struggling with a boss fight or starting to find the game wearing a little thin, co-op is always an option.
Multiplayer isn’t accessible right off the bat though, like Dark Souls there are some minor hoops to jump through first before you can start tackling the big bads with your buddies. For starters, you need to have finished the tutorial mission through the Sunforge Temple to unlock co-op, and once that’s done you can only invite in someone that’s already on your friend’s list, so no help from random strangers sadly. Still, it’s better than nothing.
4 Worst: The Clunky Combat
It’s hard to list things that are bad about Godfall without talking about the combat. From the trailer, it looked like a balanced hack-and-slash game with multiple weapon types and modes of play to engage with whoever you were facing off against. In practice though, what we got was a clunky, slow-to-respond spam fest with flashy attacks that cover the screen in particle effects, whilst it did look pretty, it made spotting enemy telegraphs much more difficult.
Danger indicators are also hard to see as their minimal design gets washed out by everything else going on and the lack of input-canceling in combo strings meant you were locked into hard-baked animations that always left you open to attack. So you would often be stuck performing a move such as a heavy or light attack until it’s finished and if an enemy is already winding up a big swing, you’re going to eat a faceful of sword. It can take a while to work around the input delay, so keep that in mind if you’re used to more responsive third-person action games like the Souls or DMC series.
3 Best: Missions Tend To Be Quick
Godfall can take a long time to beat as getting through each area requires collecting a set amount of sigils and special keys to unlock the next chapter. This is where the grind kicks in as there are a lot of them and the number of sigils you need to progress increases as you get further into the game.
Despite the slow combat, it won’t take you too long to blow through these missions individually. Most of them, especially the Hunt Missions, are relatively quick and shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to churn through. Which is a good as it makes Godfall a decent turn-and-burn game in that you can jump in, grind up a little bit then drop it again until the next urge takes you.
2 Worst: Solaris Ascendant
Though this one is debatable as there is a lot of fury over how much of a brick wall Grieves Sunsteel is. But that’s just a brutal fight against a big lad with some larger hammers and a penchant for sending out a lot of flame attacks, limiting the arena and calling in his friends. Like all the other bosses in Godfall, you can grind him down as the game checkpoints your progress as you whittle down their health bar and with well-timed dodges it’s doable. But by far the worst boss is Solaris Ascendant and here’s why.
Solaris is another fire-spewing boss, that also likes to limit the arena, but where things get worse is his attack is a large AOE that is hard to spot, harder to dodge, and puts you on your backside in a stunned state if you so much as graze it. Plus, it’s still super easy for him to stun-lock you into oblivion. It makes what could be a fun and interesting boss fight into a frustrating, dodge-filled mess, that when combined with the clunky and slow-to-respond controls can put many off completing it.
1 Worst: The Camera
For a third-person action game, you need a good camera, ideally, something that sits way back and gives you a nice arena view of the carnage you’re creating. Godfall doesn’t do that. Instead, things are kept close and tight, which for a brawler doesn’t make a lot of sense as it limits your view considerably.
It gets much more noticeably when lock-on is involved as the camera zooms right in behind you, looming over your shoulder so those particle effects can be shown off. Whilst it looks cool, it can lead to you losing track of where other enemies are, and when things start getting hectic you’ll end up blindsided often. So don’t use lock-on unless it’s a single target fight, and event then try to use it sparingly as that tunnel vision effect also makes it harder to spot any AOE attack markers or debuffs zones.
NEXT: The 10 Best FromSoftware Games, Ranked (According To Metacritic)
