The “Bullet Hell” shooters have always distinguished themselves with their high level of difficulty, but Godstrike from the OverPowered Team is an isolated case. This title puts you one on one against fearsome bosses and differs from other works of the genre in its mechanics, among other things by the fact that the life bar is closely linked to a timer. It’s not a game for the faint of heart. So if you have a tendency to throw the controller as low as possible against the wall to make a challenge harder, it might be better to find something else.
As we mentioned earlier, Godstrike introduces a new aspect that puts us under pressure as the energy is tied to a timer that progresses slowly. At the same time, this health is reduced when projectiles hit you. So you need to act quickly and be careful to avoid harm. When your life is running out or your time is running out, you can take one last hit before you lose and have to start over. A priori this mechanic sounded pretty good, but at least it was too frustrating for us. As if surviving bosses with three or four phases wasn’t enough of a challenge, this title encourages you to rush among the many projectiles that come your way.
To counter its incredible difficulty, Godstrike has an easy mode, but you won’t be able to choose it until you’ve lost to the same boss at least three times. Either way, this simple mode doesn’t make things that much easier either, the only difference being that you can get three hits without affecting the life bar. Plus, these wildcards don’t go far when you’re in a shower of projectiles, which makes Easy Mode pretty absurd to be honest.
However, it must be admitted that the bosses are well constructed and force you to stay vigilant by changing their attack patterns in three or four different phases. We found Drakhul, the third boss in the game, very interesting because each of his levels is different. In the first case, you will see a huge rib cage that releases projectiles when thrown. Later you will fight a floating skull that tries to push you to the ground and throw you into pools of lava. Every boss forces you to carefully analyze their moves and manage your time effectively, and it is highly unlikely that you will get away with it on the first try.
In addition to normal projectiles, you also have a range of active and passive skills. These active skills, which you can assign to different buttons, can help you avoid problems either by improving your attacks or by protecting yourself for a few seconds. For example, the Time Lapse ability temporarily slows enemies and their projectiles, and the Overload ability lets you fire four cone-shaped projectiles over a limited period of time. In addition, you can equip up to four passive skills, which will give you improvements such as: B. a faster movement.
We liked how passive and active skills force you to be a strategist when choosing, as some are more effective than others depending on the boss. However, active skills have one major drawback: to use them you have to sacrifice some part of your life and time, and you cannot activate them without first collecting some light blue orbs that appear on the battlefield from time to time. Between projectiles falling everywhere and slowly dwindling health, we avoided these skills altogether, which is a shame as many of them are useful if you use them at the right time.
One of the aspects that surprised us was the number of game modes the title has: it has an arena mode where you can face the boss you want at your own pace and with all the skills unlocked, as well as a story -Mode with a very simple plot in which you are more linear. In addition, the work has classifications so you can compete with the community to see who can beat the bosses the fastest, and it gives you daily challenges to encourage you to play in different ways. For example, with a less passive ability.
Despite the very interesting mechanics behind it, we think Godstrike is too difficult and forgiving, which is not much fun, and we would probably have stopped playing much sooner if we hadn’t taken a closer look. The fact that the life bar depends on a timer makes the game difficult, unbearable and the easy mode hardly helps. It has some positive aspects, like the well-designed bosses, as well as the large number of different game modes it offers. However, we would not recommend it unless you want to experience torture.
