Inventory management is the most intense part of God of Weapons, which is in no way throwing shade on a decent game with a solid combat system.
While defeating enemies while avoiding their attacks is enjoyable, finding the optimal way to place items into your inventory is much more interesting, with many items offering passive bonuses to surrounding items. These bonuses can differentiate between a successful run and a return to the main menu.
Reminiscent of a Chinese tangram puzzle (geometric puzzle), finding the correct way to place each item to optimise your character’s inventory is one of the most rewarding aspects of every run and more than once, I saw an item I wanted in the store only to think there would be no way I could get that shape to fit, only to spend a few minutes sliding round multiple items to create the exact shape I needed to claim the item.
It is an excellent game mechanic and one I would love to see appear in other games and genres.
Image credit God of Weapons - Published by Archmage Games Studio and developed by Archmage Labs.
God of Weapons has a fleshed-out achievement-based progression system that would be almost perfect if not for the fact many of the better items are locked behind challenges that surmount to “play in the least optimal way possible for x amount of time”, such as using items that grant a speed or armour debuff, or use only certain weapons.
While I understand the reasoning behind such a system, I am not a fan of systems that force a player to make poor choices and deliberately use bad builds to progress when alternative achievements that reward skill and time invested serve a similar purpose without forcing players to play a certain way.
Image credit God of Weapons - Published by Archmage Games Studio and developed by Archmage Labs.
With 12 classes, 36 sub-classes, and dozens of weapons and items, God of Weapons offers players immense agency when deciding how they wish to play the game.
Unfortunately, some of these classes/subclasses and weapons are overwhelmingly better or worse than others. Apart from playing one of these lesser classes/weapons for the sole purpose of completing achievements, there is no reason to play most of the classes beyond sadism, with some subclasses being so bad that they make even tier 1 difficulty runs feel like a nightmare spawned in the fires of Mount Doom.
Image credit God of Weapons - Published by Archmage Games Studio and developed by Archmage Labs.
God of Weapons offers five difficulty settings, with tier one being incredibly easy and tier 5 being impossible for some builds, without RNG being on your side and multiple maxed account-wide upgrades.
This honestly is poor game design, with some classes such as the Hunter able to clear almost every difficulty level without more than a handful of upgrades, while melee-focused classes such as the Knight or Barbarian struggling to clear tier 3 (and in some cases 2) without a perfect build and at least melee and health upgrades being at 4/5 or higher.
While a highly skilled may player may triumph over RNG and broken builds eventually, games are supposed to be fun, and losing a run because the RNG stiffed you or were unlucky enough to have chosen an unviable build feels terrible and makes playing God of Weapons feel more like a colossal waste of time than anything even close to resembling a good time.
Image credit God of Weapons - Published by Archmage Games Studio and developed by Archmage Labs.
While God of Weapons 3D models look fantastic, and it’s clear they are the work of a professional artist, the world in which every run takes place could not be less inspired, with every single run and level within said run taking place in a grey hued dungeon, which while is decent looking, lacks variety in a big way, especially on lower levels, where traps are few and far between, and players will face off against aesthetically indistinct enemies wave after wave, with only the occasional imp or blob monsters offering players something new to look at and counter.
While enemies thrash about, cast spells, and generally act out whatever action they are undertaking, the player character does none of this due to its massive personal, with weapons instead floating around the player, thrusting, shooting and slashing at will.
This, however, is not a sign of incompetent developers; rather, it is a mechanical requirement, with the player character often wielding 6+ weapons and more than a dozen items.
As much as I would like to see my knight wear three hats and six pairs of gloves while carrying half a dozen swords, I admit that some concessions must be made visually to differentiate God of Weapons mechanically from the dozens of admittedly very similar games that popular the action roguelike genre.
Image credit God of Weapons - Published by Archmage Games Studio and developed by Archmage Labs.
I could run God of Weapons at 1080p/144FPS without issue, with frame rates rarely dropping below 143 during even the most intense late-run encounters, which often have upwards of 200 moving objects on screen at any given time.
God of Weapons is a action rogue-like video game developed by Archmage Labs and published by Archmage Games Studio, it was released on 13 September 2023 and retails for $5.99.
God of Weapons is available exclusively on PC.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
God Of Weapons is unrated and contains the following:
God of Weapons is an excellent game that offers players a wide array of possible builds; unfortunately, many of these builds are simply substandard, and while playing a non-optimal build can be a fun challenge, the knowledge that some classes and builds are simply not viable without extreme micro-management and a healthy dose of luck, is why I cannot wholeheartedly recommend it while feeling it is one of the better games in the genre.
