Godhood

Being a god is hard. The life of a deity is full of challenges should you want to be successful in surviving the test of time. Installing undying faith in loyal subjects is not all gumdrops and rainbows, and Abbey Games' latest simulation-strategy title, Godhood, provides a great insight into that.

Godhood begins thousands of years ago when humanity was much less civilised. Taking place in distant jungles, you are handed the reigns to a small population, dedicated to your every whim, with the primary goal of spreading your word and expanding your religion's reach on the quest to timeless godhood. Doing so involves crushing competitors and ensuring you are the one true god as you collect powerful artefacts, spread across neighbouring islands, cementing your place in history.

To start your journey to religious domination, you first have to create your God and your religion. There is a whole range of selectable options to make your God in the image you desire, from Lovecraftian tentacles to devilish bones and goat heads. Essentially, in this section, you have the freedom to craft the religion you want, as well as select the traits that define it. The traits could be something like madness, which helps your subjects in brutal combat, or anything else from greed through to peace. The only catch is whatever you pick will be what you base your campaign on, as the benefits of a trait become the core of your assaults in the later stages of a story.

As for growing a religion, the root of development is in the community you rule over. By leading them in the right direction and by constantly giving them faith in your actions, you can lead acolytes into combat to convert other communities to your religion. With the spoils of war, you can then further upgrade your settlement, making it more efficient at generating resources and creating stronger warriors.

Combat itself is relatively simple and involves little interaction from you aside from selecting the right warriors to represent you in battle. The main mechanic to be aware of is a sort of elemental matchup system, where certain acolytes will be proficient in a specific trait (i.e. cunning or knowledge) each of which is strong against a different element and weak against another. Choosing the right warrior to take on the right opposition is crucial to ensure a crushing victory, and also important should you want your acolytes to further develop and become stronger.

There are several ways to develop a subject. First of all, experience is gained from completing combat encounters, which is used to upgrade abilities used in fights. The second is through training that can be completed in the downtime before fight sequences and is used for levelling up specific traits on characters. For example, if you have a warrior naturally proficient in cunning, you might choose to further level the trait to make them a critical-hit damage-dealing powerhouse. The trick, however, is the majority of levelling can only be done in the downtime between fight sequences, which only lasts three turns. Also, characters age and when they become too old, they die, meaning you need a steady stream of new blood constantly being trained to take over the mantle.

Alongside this, there are a bunch of relics to earn and use that elevate certain aspects of an acolyte's kit, and plenty of opportunities to further upgrade your religion and add new traits to what was already available. Essentially, the premise of Godhood is all about building out your religion to accommodate for the masses of worshippers flocking to it, and that can be done in a whole range of ways, supporting the playstyle you want your game to revolve around.

The issue, however, is that when so much is randomly generated (RNG), it can often be hard to design your religion the way you want. For example, you might choose to have a base trait of madness, which excels with warriors with high might stats. Yet every time an elder dies and you replace them with someone younger, the newcomer might have high cunning or good health. Because of this, all the temples and upgrades you created and built into around might start becoming less useful as you train up the new warrior excelling in different traits. Worse of all, you have to use them for the foreseeable future, as the elder is prone to death within the next few turns and since there is no way to remove an acolyte before they either die or defect, it means for around the next fifty turns, you're stuck with a character you don't really have much use for.

It doesn't stop there. You might conquer an island and see the next available areas to travel to and realise all of them work against, or unfavourably to the trait you built around, likely meaning for the next fifteen or so turns, you will lose most battles, ultimately haemorrhaging your religion's happiness and causing defectors. Due to all the mechanics and systems built in Godhood largely being connected, one bad turn of events can often spell disaster for your playthrough, causing you to pray for a shred of luck to make it to the end. It likely wouldn't be such a notable factor if there was a little more content to play around with, but Godhood does seem to be thin in places, which emphasises its core problems.

With all that being said, Godhood is fun. Having the power to create a religion in a way that suits you is great. The upgrade systems, albeit a little too heavily weighted to RNG, offer a variety of customisation options and the ability to build a character to suit a certain style of combat. The biggest issues, however, lie in the lack of things to do in-game, which quite often highlights other problems. Still, being able to rule as a deity for just a moment makes for an interesting experience.