#godstrike

this is one of those games that i bought in a fanatical bundle and just never bothered touching. this was just a vehicle to get wall world or affogato for cheaper. but, like... this is actually pretty good?

so the main genre is twin-stick shooter boss rush. you get free movement to dodge attacks while trying to keep your stream of bullets on the boss. the design is very bullet hell, which isnt my favorite genre but i think it was actually done really well here. i mean, the last thing youd want is your target bouncing off the walls, so its good that theyre not always moving around doing melee shit

the main gimmick is a timer. you start each fight with a few minutes, and you get a -15 second deduction whenever you get hit. once the timer reaches zero, youre put into one-hit-kill mode. this is... awesome? like this is really well done. i wanna compare it to furi, where the encounters are way longer and youre encouraged to play defensively by dodging to maintain your health and parrying to restore some of it. with godstrike, theres like a built-in balance system. you could play defensively and protect your health, but being careful takes time anyway. being more aggressive risks getting hit, but since the playstyle saves time, its a really natural trade-off that caters to either play style

theres also an ability system! active abilities and passive buffs. since actives reduce your starting timer, i went with only 2 out of the max of four: the quad-shot and the rapid fire. get in close and pop both at once and you shred through motherfuckers

if i had to complain, id say that not all of the attacks are telegraphed the best. sometimes theyll just start streaming bullets outta nowhere, and since i have a very close-quarters playstyle that really screws me over. i acknowledge that this is a trade off of the play style, being close to your enemy is inherently risky, but i still think itd be nice if there was maybe a second-ish where they visually charge up. that said, getting hit isnt run-ending, and the phases are brief enough that its easy to just memorize what they can do and keep an eye out for it. its really easy to intuit the pause between attacks after like, your second attempt

this is all pretty ignorable until the final boss, garodal. firstly, this boss commits the cardinal sin of enjoyability where the first three phases are piss-easy by your third try, but the final phase is the actual part you struggle with. good luck practising those patterns with 4 minutes of preamble every time. also watch out for him teleporting behind you and shooting a spread of bullets wider than you can strafe, also watch out for him teleporting behind you and attacking with a range wider than you can strafe, and whatever you do dont get hit by his shitty beam attack because since you dont have invincibility frames youll take damage four times from a single mistake (unless you just happen to be standing where he starts shooting, which isnt your fault but still warrents punishment i guess). these are all things games do when theyre fun and i like them.

yeah i switched to easy mode for this, and this did nothing but further convince me its bullshit because it did nothing to make the attacks less cheap. ive got a creed where if a game expects something from me, i expect the same thing from it. thats why if i perfect a game, thats a huge compliment (or its just hella easy). this is one of those games thats fun to try out, but it has too many flaws to justify investing the effort into improving my gameplay to the levels its asking for.

so yeah, for the most part, i was really surprised by this game, first by how good it was and then by how shit the final boss was. note to prospective devs, go back and work harder on your final boss. ive beaten like five games in a row that fumble the landing and leave an awful impression as a result.

again, be warned that its very difficult, but if youve got the fingers for that kinda thing then you should totally check it out. like, wow its hard. it took like an hour and a half for me to beat cindael, what the fuck are those rpgmaker hitboxes. its niche but its cheap so just try it