Gods Will Fall (Nintendo Switch) Review

Like most roguelikes that struggle due to inherent design flaws, [i|Gods Will Fall[/i] hides behind a gripping premise that's seldom pushed, challenged, or engaged with meaningfully. Audiences take control of eight shipwrecked survivors with a vendetta against the Gods. Dungeons are procedurally generated on entry, with players sending in one warrior at a time. Getting defeated by an enemy or dying from an environmental hazard ends the run, forcing players to either send in a new character or find another dungeon to explore altogether. Randomised difficulty means any given dungeon can potentially be overwhelming, but sticking one out rewards gear for the party, along with the opportunity to rescue fallen warriors in some instances.

Every character has their own play style; gameplay incentivises party rotation by diminishing the stats of any warrior who dungeon crawls too many times in a row; and a randomised difficulty curve helps in building in-game tension. It's all conceptually sound, but good video games don't live and die by concept alone. In terms of actual execution, Gods Will Fall is a failure on virtually every front. Party members have their own distinct traits along with play styles that add a layer of strategy to picking who to control in a dungeon - it's smart to bring someone who can wade through water if the area is flooded - but combat is so clunky by design that picking the "right" character hardly ever matters.

Y does a Light Attack, X does a Heavy Attack, A is a quick dodge that can become a parry if well timed, B jumps, the D-Pad rotates through the inventory, R picks up items, ZR uses any items, and ZL can restore Vigor (Health) if players have built up enough Bloodlust through combat. This is an incredibly basic control scheme for an action game, but there is enough going on mechanically for combat to at least be engaging. Unfortunately, terrible enemy design prevents this from coming to fruition. More often than not, battles are stiff affairs where players throw out clunky attacks at enemies who have too much health, but don't have the gameplay variety to pair off their durability. The easiest gameplay encounters are mindless and devolve into button mashing immediately. The hardest are pure tedium and highlight the awkward controls.

Movement is just painful across both the overworld and inside dungeons. In the former, the player controls all of their party members at once as they move in slight unison. This is to say that no two characters run at the same speed, and without an anchor character to center the party, the camera is locked into a perpetual state of disorientation where it's never focusing on any one model. How a camera depicts gameplay is extremely important and while Gods Will Fall's overworld perspective can be written off as stylisation, it nonetheless shows a fundamental misunderstanding of appealing game design. Dungeons don't fare much better. The camera actually functions as one would expect, but player movement is sluggish and unintuitive, as if everyone moves just a bit too slow and never reacts as fast as they should. For an action game, that's damning.

Procedural generation doesn't do the experience any favours either. At the end of the day, a random difficulty curve tied to gameplay that's intuitive, poorly explained, and unpolished all around is nothing short of a headache. Potentially losing a warrior early on is a tense consequence to entering a high level dungeon unprepared; but there's no way to prepare for many of the game's hardest challenges on a fresh playthrough. Success comes down to luck of the draw quite often and not in a way that makes use of RNG in a way that benefits gameplay. Level design is also rather dry, with little in the way of exploration or secrets, but that's to be expected of a roguelike that's content with the bare minimum.

No lacklustre Switch indie is complete without a myriad of technical issues, however. Along with simply being a poorly designed roguelike, Gods Will Fall is prone to occasional freezing, lagging, and even crashing. A game crash is bad enough on its own, but it's even worse here considering it actually kills whichever character is being controlled at the time. In that sense, it's basically unplayable on the Nintendo Switch. Taking its extremely generous price on the eShop into account, Gods Will Fall is best left forgotten to time.