Gameplay

Godfall is one of the launch titles for the PlayStation 5, which means it has to offer a "next-gen" graphics experience to show off the capabilities of the new hardware. I'm guessing the only reason we're seeing Godfall on the PC platform is that Gearbox, the publisher, has very close ties to Epic Games, so they brought their latest title to the Epic Game Store exclusively. I've also noticed an "AMD Radeon/Ryzen" logo in the title screens, so I guess that's another stream of revenue.

The story of Godfall is completely forgettable. It's a tale of two siblings, one betrays the other, the other wants revenge. I guess you know who you will play. While battling the minions of your brother, you're also preventing him from becoming an evil god who would terrorize the universe with his powers—yawn.

Godfall plays like a mix of Devil May Cry, Dark Souls, Borderlands, and Diablo. That sounds awesome? Yeah, the devil is in the details. You're fighting in a third-person perspective, using melee weapons only. There's plenty of those, sharp and blunt, with slightly different mechanics, special attacks, and combos. Your repertoire also expands with skill choices you unlock as you progress through the game. Besides dodging, you can also use your shield to block, or use it for additional attack combos.

The problem with this is that there's quite a lot to learn, and several keys have to be pressed at the same time, so the swordplay isn't as smooth as I'd like it to be. During fights, you cannot "cancel" animations to block, which is super frustrating, so using a slow hitting weapon means you'll have to plan ahead as you won't be able to react as quickly. C'mon, this is not Castlevania on the NES. I also found mouse+keyboard controls difficult to master, a gamepad is the better choice, maybe remapping the keyboard will improve things, I haven't tried that yet.

There's plenty of choices for character development. The skill tree has over twenty options with five sublevels each that let you adjust the fighting style to your preferences. While the selection is decent, it's not enough to really matter for your playstyle, I've seen better. On top of that you will unlock twelve valorplates while progressing through the game, which further customize the way you fight, and what your "super" ability does.

Godfall is labeled a "looter slasher," which to me feels like it translates to "dumbed-down ARPG for console gamers." There's tons of loot to find, similar to Borderlands. Each piece of equipment comes with the usual color coding: gray, green, blue, purple, and orange. You may upgrade and enchant your equipment, too. The problem is that everything I've mentioned so far that "sounds good" just feels tacked on to add complexity where there is none. Your basic game loop is to move through levels, encountering groups of enemies, which must be defeated to progress further until you reach a boss. After the boss, there are some optional level objectives, and you may comb through the maps to find additional resources. I kept thinking to myself that we've seen this before in a better way.

I mentioned Dark Souls—while the game does take inspiration from it, it is definitely not as refined and much easier, which might be a plus for many, but a con for others. Even bosses only have few mechanics that are easy to learn and usually quite obvious. There are many small bugs and issues, none game-breaking, but sometimes, you'll have to restart a map. The UI is also extremely unpolished and clunky, especially on PC.

Don't get me wrong. the fighting in Godfall is fun, and I can imagine gamers who will be willing to master the swordplay, unlock everything, and pimp out their character—be ready for the grind. There's a nice multiplayer aspect to the game where you can team up with up to four of your buddies to bring the horde down together. There's no matchmaking feature though, so unless you have a ton of friends, you'll usually end up playing alone.

Whether you're playing singleplayer or multiplayer an Internet connection is always required! This sucks as there isn't even a savegame stored on your PC. On PlayStation, you'll also need a PS Plus subscription, even for singleplayer, an additional charge. Epic wants $60 for Godfall, which it is absolutely not worth. $30 maybe, for $20, I could see myself picking it up to keep me busy. Right now there's plenty of better alternatives, like Assassin's Creed Valhalla.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

In terms of graphics, Godfall can definitely impress. It's based on Unreal Engine 4, just like Borderlands, but uses DirectX 12 exclusively. The levels look outstanding and are richly detailed. There are also various environments: one zone takes you to jungles, the other under water, etc. The map design is top-notch, they are not linear at all, and the sections are intricately connected through multiple paths, the problem is the quest indicator which leads you straight to the next objective in a linear way.

A lot of attention has been given to polish little details in the world, to make it look more lifelike, not "flat", like in Watch Dogs Legion, for example. Polygon counts are high throughout the game, everywhere you look, no complaints here. Textures are super crisp and highly detailed, too. It feel like there are some supplementary high-res shader effects at play on many surfaces that add additional grit and structure—very nice, do look at videos of this. Character animations are good, the developer definitely did a fine job here.

In Borderlands, we noticed a long "preloading shaders" screen at the start when DX12 is enabled. In Godfall, they "fixed" that by compiling the shaders during gameplay, right when they are needed. This results in hitching and stuttering as you progress through the game. Got a new weapon? Its particle effect showing for the first time? Stutter, stutter. After the first two hours or so, these stutters are minimal because most of the shaders are compiled at this point.

The GUI is terrible on PC, it seems nobody bothered to test the menus on PC with a mouse and keyboard. For example, in the settings menus, you see left and right arrows next to each option, but they can't be switched with the left or right arrow keys. When changing equipment, Esc takes you back to the game, not the previous gear screen. Dialog can't be skipped line by line with the space key, the list goes on.

At launch, there is no raytracing support in Godfall, but the developer will add that functionality in a later patch. I did spot an "amdrtshadows.dll" in the game's files, let's hope this won't turn out to be an AMD exclusive feature. While playing, I've seen lots of reflections, I guess the developer is trying to show off the "raytracing" capabilities on PlayStation 5. Too bad these are just screenspace reflections and not raytraced at all; they still look nice because of some post-processing magic and smart level design.

Hardware requirements are definitely high, no doubt, but you're getting a lot of eye candy in return. For 1080p Full HD 60 FPS gaming at maximum settings, you need a Radeon RX 5700 XT or RTX 2070 Super—high but not unreasonable. Fluid 1440p is in reach with RTX 3070 and faster. 4K60 is achievable only by the mighty GeForce RTX 3090. There's plenty of settings to dial down hardware requirements to match the game to your hardware, though.

Taking a closer look at the individual cards, we see that the game is very well optimized for older AMD GPUs: Polaris and Vega are doing considerably better than their RDNA counterparts. On NVIDIA, we see Ampere a bit ahead of Turing and Pascal. Both GPU vendors have released game-ready drivers for Godfall, which we used in all our testing. We also used the public release, not a press preview build. While we usually test actual gameplay, this is complicated in Godfall because of the always-online nature of the game and the fact that no save games exist, and you can't even save at any time. That's why we used the integrated benchmark for this article—it gives a pretty decent prediction of what to expect performance-wise, though maybe a little bit on the low side compared to actual gameplay.

It's good to see decent VRAM use at the highest settings—we measured 6–8 GB depending on the resolution. Good, modern graphics cards have plenty of memory, so there is no reason not to push up the requirements. The benchmarks show that cards with 3 and 4 GB take a massive performance hit, which isn't unexpected. If you have one of these cards, you have to dial down the graphics settings anyway because there simply isn't enough shading power, not even for 1080p at maximum details, which the GTX 1060 3 GB vs. 6 GB data illustrates nicely. What's more important is that high-end PCs do have the option to run at significantly better fidelity than consoles because a unique selling point is needed to sustain the PC Master Race.