God Mode

Platform: PC - Steam
Price: £6.99
Developer: Old School Games
Genre: Action
Overall rating: 4/5

God Mode is a delightful and refreshing take on an action shooting game. It has a good injection of humour and is built on the basis of 'just let me kill stuff'. There's no real story to worry about or objectives that make you careful about who you're shooting at or anything, just step into the arena and start killing!

The various levels are split into numerous zones, entered either by running through a gateway or stepping into a portal. Each zone will start sending the waves of enemies, once you're inside - but there's a twist - every time you enter a zone, a game modifier is chosen at random and locked in at the (mostly) central altar. These modifiers/modes could help or hinder you depending on your luck, and completely change the dynamics of the game. Just some of these modifiers or rather, "Tests of faith" include:

• Arrows - Infinite ammo
• Dice - Your weapon changes every 10 seconds
• Discord - Sounds are sped up
• God Mode - Players get random periods of invulnerability and infinite ammo
• Hat - All enemies wear hats
• Poison - Your health slowly drains, but enemies are weaker
• Sanctuary - Enemies take damage when too close to the altar
• Shroud - A thick fog makes it hard to see
• Twins - Two giant minotaurs are spawned, which need to be killed simultaneously

There are many more than that (30+ total), but it should give you a fair idea of the various ways with which your gameplay might be altered.

It is worth noting just how important those modifiers are, however. As the maps are limited (only 5 I believe) and it's a similar story with the weapons. There are quite a few weapons, with many old favourites such as SMG, shotgun, minigun etc, plus a plasma pistol, buzzsaw and some others. These weapons are upgradeable (for rapidly increasing prices) and can be accompanied by a special ability (also upgradeable) such as a temporary shield, or healing ability.

You can choose two weapons on your loadout, which is very important to think about, because depending on your luck with modifiers and the different spawns for certain zones & maps, ammo can be a bit of a pain. For this reason, I would not recommend taking 2 powerful weapons with low ammo capacities, as it tends not to be worth the risk. If you use an ability (aura) that recovers ammo however, it might be more viable, but I personally favour the shield and healing auras.

There's a fair variety of monsters. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, melee and ranged attacks, ground-based and flying, fast and slow, weak and strong. The enemies have plenty of potentially annoying and frustrating mechanics, with player-seeking magical skulls and powerful minotaur charges, which just make you that bit more proud when you finally hear "Test of faith complete" from your trusty spirit guide.

Overall, I'd have to say that God Mode is cracking shooting game to just mindlessly kill loads of stuff - it does require thought and tactics in some places, but it's basically a run 'n' gun arena of mayhem. It's a great way of killing time, without being stuck in it for the long haul as each map run tends not to take more than 20 minutes solo. On that note, co-op is great fun and well worth a try! The only issue with this sometimes being ammo/health/armour pickups, as adding more players doesn't increase pickup counts. As long as everyone's on the ball though, it shouldn't be an issue.

God Mode is a brilliant game if you want to run around mindlessly killing endless hordes of zombies. It has game modifiers for the various zones to try and spice things up and keep it fresh, but it does get fairly repetitive quite quickly. I still find it fairly easy to revisit, as I do like a good killing spree and the voice over is very amusing. At the end of the day, it costs very little but can generate numerous hours of fun, and for that I can only recommend you check out the screenshots below and give it a go.

- Smokeys_13

God Mode is great for a bit of senseless hack-'n-slash action. Gameplay is simple but challenging, relying on pickups for ammo and health when you're completely swamped by enemies means you really have to pay attention! Graphics and sound are pretty run of the mill, but the voice over is hilarious, listen out for some cracking one-liners. 

Replayability is a bit of an odd one - the random replenishment drops and game modes means rarely two games work out the same, but on the whole it gets a little repetitive after a while. This especially becomes true when you've played enough to know the tactics so the challenge all but disappears (though you can still be caught out!) 

- HolmesyLogic

Images courtesy of the Steam community