Game Reviews

God Mode is a four-player horde shooter that can be played alone, but only in the sense that Strip Solitaire exists and can be called a game. Each of the five levels, all simple but beautiful in design, is made up of a series of linked arenas. Monsters pour in, and it’s your team’s job to make them regret having bothered. The basic action is exactly that, with weapons that feel a touch weak (unless you’re using a controller that adds a shot of rumble to every action,) but otherwise landing between "solid" and "decent" from the moment you blast your first skeleton into bones. The main annoyance is that character movements can be sluggish, which isn't too bad when getting around, but can be a matter of life and death when a big monster decides to try swinging something heavy at your face.

Unsurprisingly for a budget game, God Mode has a limited amount of content – though it uses what it has well, and pulls 

off some tricks to stretch it out.Enemies for instance, while shamelessly abusing color palette swaps to bolster their roster, offer plenty of variety and show up in big enough crowds that the familiarity doesn’t matter too much. Everything that is presented also comes with an endearing grin and sense of fun, befitting its co-op only approach to blasting around the underworld. Beat a whole map, and the team is granted a couple of minutes in a divine treasure house full of free gold to pocket, with friendly fire switched on so that everyone can blow off a little post-match steam. The narrator doesn’t take any of this seriously either, even if his sarcasm soon gets old.

The real life-stretcher, though, is that the maps play differently every game due to the addition of Tests of Faith – random mutators at the start of each arena that might do something as basic as messing with the sound, as fundamental as switching on friendly fire, as helpful as giving everyone unlimited ammo, or as random as making bombs rain from the sky until all the monsters are dealt with. Every time, the action is at least a little different. Sometimes, "a little" is all a mutator tries for, and that’s fine. The best ones, however, encourage different playstyles. Chest and Sanctuary encourage everybody to stay close to an altar in exchange for goodies and help against enemies that get too close, or the more chaotic Dice, in which everyone’s weapon changes every few seconds.

The range is impressive, and fun to uncover. Unless desperately unlucky though, a full team should have little trouble blasting through anything God Mode throws at them on at least default difficulty. At this point there are two more settings to crank it up to, and also special masochism modes to help better players progress faster, and perhaps prevent anyone accusing publisher Atlus of having gone soft. These Oaths come at the start of every game, scaling up from taking more damage and dealing less, to every hit inflicting poison damage, each for an appropriate boost to earned gold and XP. Swearing them all and running screaming at the first Cyclops in sight is not a good way to make or keep online friends, even with a good team trying to run interference.

For longer-term play, there are of course weapons to unlock, starting with an SMG and shotgun and ending up with the likes of a plasma pistol, railgun, and buzzsaw, all of which are purchasable and can be upgraded using collected gold after hitting specific ranks. Every player also gets a special ability tied to a rage meter, starting with Shield and stepping up through powers like having enemies struck down from on high or being turned into friendlies on demand.

It’s in browsing the catalogue though that God Mode’s limitations really become clear. There’s not much to aspire to, and while these weapons may be effective, they’re not particularly interesting given the underworld setting. A few ripped-from-mythology toys wouldn’t have gone amiss, even if they did end up alongside the more immediately familiar conventional weapons and future technology. Cosmetic upgrades are even more restricted, limited to just a few variations on just a couple of basic outfits, and with no female character options at all. In any event, once you’ve run the gorgeous maps, be it with friends or pick up groups, the basic combat and co-op action are unlikely to offer enough temptation to keep returning in search of God Mode mastery.