Game Reviews

Gods VS Humans - Protect your Kingdom

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Gods VS Humans - Protect your Kingdom

The followers of ancient gods were continuously tying themselves in knots trying to figure out what their chosen deities wanted of them.

Were they angry? Indifferent? Bored? Or altogether absent? Would pleasing one upset another?

Microids's Gods VS Humans doesn't just feature some of these very mythical beings; it also shares a similarly confused nature.

Divine intervention

In this action-strategy game, Microids throws so many embellishments at you (its tutorial section is virtually a separate mode), it's tough to get a grasp on what exactly this game is. Ultimately, though, you realise that whatever it is, it isn't particularly interesting or satisfying.

Even the setup is conflicted. You play the part of a mythical being who must put an increasingly haughty humanity back in its place. However, you also feed off their worship and happiness, so mustn't harm them directly. What?

As this oddly bipolar deity, you have to topple the mighty towers that humanity is attempting to build in a bid to supplant you. You do so by zapping out the supporting pillars from each floor with a range of elemental attacks, all of which you activate through a steadily recharging power bar.

Collapsing a floor damages the floors around it and weakens the structure's foundations. As such, it's possible to set off chain reactions by weakening several floors, though we found this process slightly vague and ill-defined.

Deus ex machina

Annoyingly, the humans work in direct opposition to you, repairing the structures that you seek to destroy. Equally irritating is the aforementioned fact that harming humans directly upsets them and makes them work even harder to build and repair.

Given that none of your godly attacks is particularly precise or instantaneous, this is a problem. Put simply, collateral damage is inevitable yet directly counter-productive.

Still, you are allowed and encouraged to take a number of tactical approaches to offset the chaos. You can chase humans off, appease them by sending an attractive female, and target empty floors, for example.

There are loads of enemy units, room types, and powers to consider, but they're often hard to pick out in the scrum. There are good priests and bad priests and protectors and chaps with ram helmets and reinforced levels and... it's all just too much.

Maybe if the controls were slicker, this would all have felt a little less disjointed. In reality, they're sluggish and unreliable, especially when it comes to scrolling between levels.

Giveth and taketh away

Gods VS Humans is an undoubtedly generous package in terms of the number of levels and unlockables, but that's not the point. Its core gameplay is simply too much of a grind. It's just not fun enough.

Microids can't be faulted for its ambition, but that ambition has been focused in all the wrong areas (on the extra stuff that enhances a strategy game rather than bolstering the core experience).

Call us fickle or cruel, but we don't feel moved to grant Gods VS Humans our favour.

Gods VS Humans - Protect your Kingdom

A lopsided action-strategy game in which too many different elements are thrown at you. Microids fails to create a memorable experience here
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.