Godsrule review

Godsrule is a sneaky devil. You can play it for hours, egged on by the entertaining combat and the alluring art style – you’ll progress as well. In a genre where the name of the game is waiting and waiting, God’s Rule feels like a bullet train. Unfortunately it’s more like a donkey wearing roller blades. There comes a point where the wheels are almost certainly going to come off, and then you’re just left with a donkey.

Godsrule gameplay video [HD]

Cartoon Mayhem – Godsrule: War of Mortals has an art style entirely unlike anything else you’ve ever played. It’s a semi-shaded look that manages to feel fresh in a genre filled with a kind of gritty comic-influenced water colour realism. The animation on the village screen can be underwhelming and the lack of variety in the battle arenas is acceptable, but a little disappointing. On the whole though, it’s difficult to be anything but impressed.

Take to the Field – I don’t think I’ve ever played an MMORTS game of this sort where I actually felt a part of the battle. Godsrule puts you right onto the battlefield, it lets you control units and cast spells. It’s not super-deep, but it’s enough to make battles feel like something more than a foregone conclusion. It gives you, as the most powerful person in your village, a sense of actually having some degree of power. That in itself should be rewarded.

The Magic Spell – More than just the base way in which the combat works, however, the way it has been built upon is excellent as well. With different creatures of different types to train and send into battle, there’s a wide scope for tactical manoeuvres. Add to that the magic that you can use during combat and there are an awful lot of ways to change the tide of battle.

Clearing Forests – Even the actual upkeep of your village is relatively interesting. You start off with a very small band of buildings and are shown how to clear out the surrounding forest. As you progress and gain access to more resources, you can clear out more of the forest. This gives you an unordinary amount of control over how you want to layout and position your buildings. It doesn’t matter to the actual game, but, again, it’s something that adds an illusion of power. 

You got a reward! Have a reward! – This is another of those games where it seems impossible to do anything without getting some sort of reward in return. That in itself isn’t too bad, when you consider the target audience, but you’ll find doing even the most random, silly things will result in you still having more or less everything you need to continue. For people that perhaps don’t want to play with a safety net, it’s an unfortunate way to play.

Spending Gems – And this is where the wheels fall off. In a genre built around the idea of waiting hours for anything to happen, Godsrule allows you to speed through everything right from the get go. You get a huge amount of gems with which to clear forest, build buildings and train troops. And then they run out and you’re left, once again waiting for something, anything to happen. Hell, even the opening parts of the tutorial let you play through without signing up, until you actually get to the village, at which point you’re forced into signing up for a SEGA ID or through Facebook. This is a game that’s all about reward up front.

And if you don’t pay? – Well then, you’ll find yourself going from the most powerful player in the world to somebody who needs to wait well over an hour for a single unit to make it out of training. It, of course, depends on the unit or building, but they can take a long time or can be bought with an amount of gems that never seems proportionate. It always seems to say “this could be SO much easier.”

Conclusion: Godsrule review

Godsrule tries to be clever, I think that’s where the problem lies. Instead of relying on its unique visual style, its combat, characters and magic, they’ve resorted to trying to get the player hooked before demanding more money. Other games in the genre beg you to like them on Facebook or offer you a paid solution to every problem. God’s Rule GIVES you the paid solution and then takes it away, offering just an occasional glimmer of progression. What would have been a great game ends up feelings quite unbalanced, and only those that are happy to play for shorter periods will find the pacing completely and utterly unbearable.

The first four or five hours will offer you the MMORTS genre experience you’ve always dreamed of, and then you’ll need your credit card.

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