Spent More on the Beer I Drank
GodMode is a fine game. It costs $9.99, and I played it for about four hours last night. We completed all of the levels, fooled around with the Oath system, and futzed around with the different guns and difficulty modes. I should probably preface this by saying that I'm tired of third person shooters, tired of cover based shooting, and vastly prefer a decent game with clever elements to an extremely well executed game of standards. That being said, does God Mode really stand up to other $10 games on Steam? Probably, who cares. It's ten bucks. I spent more on the beer I drank playing the game than the game itself. So, whatever.
The levels are all fairly bland. You won't be left drowning in visuals or gasping for breath in a sweet sea of aesthetically pleasing goop. They look decent, and provide a fine backdrop to shooting guys a lot. This is fine. For a $10 game, you could really do a lot worse in terms of visuals. It's fine. Probably a UDK game, so yeah, you get all of the standards of the aging current generation of Unreal Engine games. In addition to being linear affairs, the levels are separated into distinct battle arenas. In these arenas, you fight waves of monsters to progress to the next area. These arenas and the battles are referred to in-game as "Tests of Faith," and each arena has a modifier applied to the fight. These are sort of like mutators in an Unreal Tournament or Halo multiplayer game; you'll get easy ones like "Arrows" where all the players get infinite ammo, and more difficult ones like "Titan" where all the enemies are bigger and stronger. There are fairly ineffectual ones that do stuff like change the playback speed of all the sounds or add fog to the arena, making a little tougher to see. There are a few "Tests of Faith" that grant a specific player an ability or a hinderance. "God Mode" randomly grants a single player invincibility and infinite ammo for a short period of time before moving to the next player. These are all fairly fun, but feel a little shallow and uninspired.
The Oath system is a way for you to provide yourself with extra experience and gold by increasing the difficulty of the game. While there are three different difficulty levels (Bronze, Silver, and Gold,) the match bonus provided by the Oath system keeps it a relevant (and perhaps even better,) method of acquiring more XP and sweet, sweet dollars. The Oaths range from moderately easy (less ammo recieved on an ammo pickup and less health recieved on item pickup ) to extremely challenging (no armor, no abilities, or player gets poisoned from every hit). You can stack these Oaths to give yourself a major challenge and get upwards of +100% XP and Cash. Again, like most things, it's O.K. It's a cool system. Not every player needs to have these Oaths on, either. It's on a player-to-player basis, and it's selectable while you wait to find friends to play with, or wait for your party to ready-up.
The different guns in the game are mildly entertaining. The starting weapons, an SMG and a Double-Barreled Shotgun, are both terrible. The awfulness of these guns (without upgrades) was a source of much complaining between me and my friends. It makes this game pretty difficult to start out in. With a few upgrades (notably the accuracy and damage of the SMG), the game became fun again because things would actually die when you shot at them. I replaced my shotgun with a revolver, upgraded it's ammo count to 9 and it's damage fairly significantly, and it became a much more viable option. Additionally, you'll find gimmicky weapons like Saw blade launchers and Rail Guns available at higher levels, and they seemed fairly effective with the short time I played with them. (I should note that I didn't get them legitimately, we had a "Test of Faith" that provided us with random guns that kept cycling for the entire fight.) Either way, don't expect anything totally original or exciting.
Again, with a few beers and a few good friends, this game is a fun coop experience. It's good for a few hours, and there isn't anything blatantly wrong with the game. (Aside from some fairly shitty menus.) We might pick it up and play again, or we may never play it again. Either way, it was ten dollars, so it was worth the price of admission. It's like buying a movie ticket in that regard, if not even more cost effective. I can not complain too much because of this.
