Gods Will Fall

Numinous landscapes and skull-rattling combat combine in this leftfield classic

An inventive Souls-meets-roguelike that frustrates and delights in equal measure.

Gods Will Fall is a unique and challenging dungeon crawler that cleverly combines a handful of inventive gameplay mechanics, resulting in constantly tense and thrilling runs through some seriously tough death chambers and boss battles. This is a pretty brutal and unforgiving game – one some players are sure to bounce hard off – but stick with it until it clicks, explore, experiment, forge ahead through frustration and you'll be rewarded with one of the most addictive and original roguelikes we've played in quite some time.

Gods Will Fall is a well-focused action-oriented dungeon-crawling soulslike with procedural generation. Only the procedural generation is on the difficulty, allowing for developers Clever Beans to have handcrafted each dungeon in a stunning hand-brushed art style and have each playthrough feel that bit different, as the increased difficulty of a particular dungeon brings new creatures, paths, and opportunities. While not perfect, some things like the rather barren overworld as well as some bugs standing out, the character development, emergent storytelling and tight combat does more than enough to let this stand out.

Games built entirely around boss battles can be great.

Gods Will Fall doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. The gameplay is too repetitive for it to work as a roguelike and the combat is too clunky for it to work as a straight hack and slash game.

Juggling sub-par game design with a host of technical issues on the Switch, Gods Will Fall is a painfully disappointing roguelike that plays more like a proof of concept than anything else. Fashioning gameplay around eight distinct playable characters who can all permanently die is certainly interesting and adds an inherent tension to the experience, but stiff controls, laughable enemy AI, and shallow combat do nothing but remind audiences that they can be playing something better. The fact DeepSilver would publish a title so blatantly unready for public consumption - let alone purchase - is frankly baffling. Gods Will Fall is as much a waste of time as it is money.

There are some clever ideas to be found within the world of Gods Will Fall, but they can't make up for the fact that it often feels like a tedious slog.

A charming top-down dungeon crawler without quite enough challenge or content. Gods Will Fall is worth grabbing on sale, even if you won't ever be worshipping it.

If you’ve the patience of a saint to be at the whim of the gods, Gods Will Fall is your kind of game.