Video Game Review: Godstrike

Developer: OverPowered Team

Publisher: Freedom Games

Genre: Bullet Hell

PlayStation 4

Godstrike is a boss-rush styled bullet hell game.  While this specific merging of genres has produced some excellent results in the past (such as the phenomenal Furi in 2016), Godstrike is a lackluster title that made me question what exactly the designers were thinking on many occasions.

The main conceit of Godstrike is that the player’s health bar doubles as a timer which is constantly counting down (each boss gives about 4 to 6 minutes to complete) and which also is used to “purchase” abilities before each fight. While interesting in theory, it actually ends up being needlessly annoying when coupled with small hitboxes that aren’t always where they look like they should be, a lack of any aim correction, and the fact that many bosses have movement patterns which make it very difficult to even hit them (exacerbated by the aforementioned poor hitboxes). Far too much of any given fight is spent waiting for an opportunity to actually land a few attacks while watching your health steadily drain away through no fault of your own.

Once the timer hits zero, the player doesn’t actually die until they take one more hit, making it theoretically possible to win even after running out of health. However, many bosses have attack patterns that are really only avoidable if you get lucky, and there’s hardly any invulnerability period after taking a hit. By the nature of bullet hell as a genre, this makes it possible and even easy to lose an entire minute off your health bar in the span of about three seconds by taking four hits in quick succession because you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or your reaction to getting hit the first time took you into the path of more projectiles. Especially frustrating is when this happens because a boss’s attack creates a flash or other vision obscuring effect which adds a layer of artificial difficulty to parsing what you need to do to avoid getting hit, which happens with at least three different attacks across two different bosses. To top it all off, the player character and even certain attacks also have janky hitboxes, which is one of the worst things a bullet hell game can fail at.

Godstrike comes with a short story mode consisting of ten bosses and about a paragraph of the protagonists inner monologue before each. Every boss gives the player a new active and passive ability, the latter of which have no cost to equip. Once you finish with the story, there’s three other game modes for you to try out, the difference between which is explained nowhere so I guess I’m about to do part of the developers’ job for them. Arena mode is a sort of practice stage that allows the player to test out every active and passive in the game while fighting against any boss they choose. Challenge Mode starts the player with one random active and passive ability each and pits them against five bosses in a somewhat randomized order (the final boss is always the last fight and each stage picks from a block of the story order, at least as far as I can tell) while also introducing randomized boons and curses, and the Daily Challenge is the same but can only be attempted once per day. Dying in either the Challenge or Daily Challenge modes sends the player back to square one in that mode. Both challenge modes actually exacerbate my previously mentioned problem with certain attacks coming down to luck over skill to be able to avoid by making it so that nine times out of ten the player won’t have access to the dodge ability (which costs time to equip just like other actives, for the record) making fights that are manageable in the story much worse than they need to be.

Oh, and if you do decide to go through challenge modes you better hope you don’t get the “boon” of slight auto-aim while going up against the worm boss, because the interaction of those two things is all sorts of messed up and makes a boss that was already hard to hit that much more obnoxious.

Aside from the poorly balanced gameplay, Godstrike is largely unremarkable. Graphics and boss/arena designs aren’t really anything special, and the soundtrack is unmemorable. Animations are bland (which in turn adds another factor to the pile of things which make predicting and dealing with attacks a nightmare), the whole game lacks any real sense of impact, and there’s one “boon” in the challenge modes which provides a map that is clearly meant to be a tongue-in-cheek joke about how there’s no need for a map but ends up being another frustration by way of putting an ugly piece of paper on screen that blocks part of your view.

In 2016, Furi was the first bullet hell game that I really got into, and it served as a gateway to me trying and enjoying more of them. If Godstrike had been my introductory bullet hell instead, I would’ve sworn the genre off because of how poor of an impression it would have left on me about the fairness of such games. Whether you’re a big fan of bullet hell titles looking for your next fix or a more casual gamer wanting to dip your toes in the pool, my advice remains the same: stay away from this one.