God Mode (2013)

God Mode is a wave shooter with some unique mechanics, that sadly falls short in many ways. It is broken, way too slow and gets repetitive quick because of the lack of content.

You play as a random dude from the modern age, that tries to escape the Greek underworld and eternal damnation by Hades. To achieve this, he needs to battle his way through a map with different waves of enemies. While I really liked the Greek atmosphere and enemies, it is a little misplaced that a random guy, without any backstory or ties to ancient Greece (as far as I can tell) is trapped there.

Although a simple wave shooter, God Mode has some unique features. At the start of a match, you can choose some passive penalties called oaths, which decrease ammo pickups, decrease your damage done or poisoning you when you take damage. The rewards for completing a stage with these oaths enabled is extra XP and gold, depending on the severity of the penalty.

Also, in each wave, a “Test of Faith” activates, giving you a penalty or bonus in that wave which can really help you out, but more commonly screws you over with sh!t like “one hit deaths for you and the monsters”, “Skeletons are much bigger and stronger”, “your ammo drains away” and many more.
Speaking of ammo, this is one of the biggest catastrophes of this game. You run out of it in seconds, can hold a pathetic amount of bullets and when you are out, it is game over. There are pickups, but on higher difficulties, it is still insultingly low what you get.

There is a serious lack of content in God Mode. You can choose six different maps and that’s it. No extra modes, no different approaches, just choose a map and go. After you played every map, the game becomes repetitive and boring, especially because you reach level 24 in no time, giving you nothing more to achieve. Sure, you can upgrade your guns with the gold you earned, buy new ones and buy all sorts of clothing, but it feels kind of pointless, especially when the highest tier weapons, suck harder than the first weapon you start with.

The character models and the enemies are all greatly done. You got Minotaur’s, Cyclops, gladiators, ghouls and skeletons. Their detail, and the detail in the environment is incredible and it is such a shame that these amazing graphics and this level of artwork are used in such a bad game.

The sound effects and music however are a little generic and do not offer that much to enhance the experience. The hits on enemies and the grunts they release all sound good, but all the guns sound like pea shooters.

God Mode is plagued by stability issues. Game crashes, stuck loading screens, it is terrible. There is a fix however. Not a patch, not some sort of tweak, no, just set your graphics settings on low and you are good. Wait what? I never heard of a fix in which the graphics make the game playable.

The absolute worst aspect of this game, is the movement speed of your character. It is the slowest movement cycle I have ever experienced. Many times I got a horde of angry snails behind me, trying to get past me. The walk to the first portal on the Basilisk Pit level, in which you start the first wave, takes ten seconds, even tough it is right in front of you. It feels like you have glue on your feet. It is so painstakingly slow that I tried to push the W key down harder in an attempt to go faster, but it did not happen. A constipated sloth is faster than you and, I am sure that my own fat ass could outrun the playable character while crawling, with a bag of bricks tied to my back.

Then, after almost five years (with some breaks) that I owned, and sometimes played this game, I found out that you can sprint by holding down the space bar, which is used for rolls. The universe passed me by and new opportunities arose. Now, I could finally move faster and maybe last longer than five minutes. My hopes were in vain. When I sprinted through a level, with a horde of murderous cryptids behind me, I wanted to turn around to thin out the horde, but when turning, twenty spears, five axes and a mace were already planted deep in my face, all the enemies stuck to my butt like flies on a pile of sh!t. Not one inch of space was created by sprinting away from them..

I want to make a special note for the hit recovery time. It is just as bad as X-blades. You get clubbed down like a baby seal by the tree of a Cyclops and need to get back up. The animation that follows takes hours and hours. You slowly sit up right, you press your hand against the floor to lift yourself up, stand on one leg while the other is still getting up, finally stand up straight and after that, wiggle your head to shake of the dizziness. Do I need to explain what happened in the meantime? Of course, hundreds and hundreds of enemies are nicely rounded up in a circle around you and are sharpening their weapons; patiently waiting for you to finish your little act. When the animation is over, the club of the Cyclops is violently rammed so hard into your rectum, that you do not even feel the forty spears and axes anymore, that mutilated your face and legs. The worst part about it is that you just know that it is over, but still need to watch the animation that is five seconds away from your violent death. It is just bad game design at another level.

So in the end, I liked the artwork, the graphics and fluent animations, but the game is just too repetitive, boring, sloooooow, blend and empty.

For this reason, I cannot recommend this game.