To you have what it takes to join the ranks of the God Eaters?
I was able to play the demo for God Eater Resurrection at the Electronics and Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this year at the Bandai Namco booth. Recently, I received a demo code for the game for the PlayStation 4 so lets get right into it.
In typical Bandai Namco fashion, the game has voice acting but this time around, the company decided to have English voice actors in the game. Usually the game has Japanese voices in the game but this was a welcome surprise. God Eater has a slight tutorial mode but it isn’t thrown down your throat. It gives you the option to play it at all. If you don’t feel like playing the tutorial, you don’t have to. It gives you the ability to gain more experience points, since the game is an role playing game so why wouldn’t you play the mode, if it meant more experience points?
During the early parts of God Eater, you get to meet and interact with the non-playable characters but some of those NPC characters will come with you on missions. In turn, they will go from NPC to semi-playable characters during the course of the game.
You mission in God Eater is to join the Fenrir Organization’s Far East Branch and command the new God Arc weapon. The organization needs you to fight and fight well! The God Arc transforms between a sword-like weapon and a gun-like weapon. You will need to learn how each Aragami( the monstrous enemies) fight and come up with strategies to defeat them.
That might be using different bullets to attack or it could be going right into the fray and hacking and slashing, it’s really up to you. You will need to apply for missions at the main desk in the center of the Organization. You can also purchase new items for attacking and healing in this center. You will need to stock up on items so you don’t perish in battle. If you die in multiplayer missions, you will take about thirty seconds to re-spawn so hopefully, your partner will survive that long so you can get back into the battle.
You learn early on in the game that you can use your God Arc weapon to take down Aragami as well as steal items off their deceased carcasses. You can also find items strewn about the locales of the missions you take on. If you have the time when you’re not getting chased by giant Aragami!
One of the neat features put in the game takes a page out of the Nintendo Wii handbook. The Wii-motes had speakers built into them and allowed for sound effects and voices to be projected out of them.
The PlayStation 4 controller has a speaker built into it and is used in a similar notion. God Eater uses the controller speaker has a radio where your home base at the Organization communicates with you. They will give you advice and fear for your safety by using the controller as a walkie-talkie. Things like this should be done more often and shows that the developers put the time into development.
You can play single player mode in the story as well as an online multiplayer mode. You will need to select the online mode from the menu screen as well as start a new gameplay session. You aren’t able to go online mid-game so make sure you save before you stop. You will have to go to a terminal in the game-world to save as well as check your inventory and emails so you’ll want to stop at the terminals from time to time!
At times, God Eater felt less like a strategy RPG and more like a button masher/hack and slash type game. You will need to come up with different attack patterns to attack the larger groups of Aragami but for the most part you can go right in and take them down.
Also, there is a sprint meter that runs out after you run for a while but I can’t stand things like this. I understand that it adds more strategy to the game but just having a gage that allows me to run doesn’t work for me. More games are doing things like this but I don’t have to like it. It also felt like the difficulty jumped up too quickly in my opinion.
There were quite a few early easy missions but then the first increased difficulty mission felt a little too much for the time in the game. Combine that with the controls being a little over complicated and you find yourself using the wrong weapons or switching for no reason.
One other thing I didn’t care for was that when you needed to heal yourself, the Aragami would follow you at times and there really wasn’t a place for cover. You needed to stop moving and select the healing item and if the Aragami is right on top of you, you’re screwed!
It’s these reasons that I’m giving God Eater: Resurrection for the PlayStation 4 an 8.5 out of 10.
Score: 8.5 / 10
