;Oh My Godheads! is an arena-based party game developed by Titutitech and published by Square Enix – Focusing on a set of legendary heads known as “Godheads”, quite literally being the decapitated heads of various gods and deities from various mythologies and legends; iconic gods in media such as Thor, Kali, Skadi and more appear each with their own unique mechanics and abilities that can either benefit or damage the player, making up seven in total; these abilities range from calling down a hail of thunderbolts to strike down surrounding opponents, inverting control schemes, causing a forcefield that pushes away players and many more!
Arguably, the tossing of heads back and forth between combatants is one of the best parts of Oh My Godheads!; planning out each head’s unique cooldown and charge times, and predicting the best range to throw them at can make them into extremely varied grenades that can really shake up any match in a variety of ways; a good example of this is being able to push your foes to their deaths off the confines of the map using the Catfish head, or freezing all your enemies using Skadi – Leading to easy points.
Oh My Godheads! features (upon launch of the PS4 version) 10 playable characters, 10 different stages, 7 different Godheads, 4 different game modes and a variety of different Trials, optional challenges that test your proficiency at the different modes; this however, was when I began to notice some of the kinks within Oh My Godheads!. It’s important to first note, however, that the game is still in Early Access, and has been since its launch on Steam Greenlight back in April of this year.
Beginning with the aforementioned Trials, a good number of these Trials highlight a lot of problems with the overall control scheme of Godheads!, requiring extremely precise aiming with a painstakingly slippery movement system, making the simple act of throwing explosive pies, dashing and throwing heads a journey of trial and error – to me, this was most noticeable during one early Trial where you’re required to throw a Godhead between yourself and an AI competitor, and to try and catch it as many times as you can mid-air within the time limit; whilst there is a degree of ‘catching magnetism’ when it comes to the Godheads, it doesn’t seem to be more than a small circle slightly larger than the character model.
Another issue arises when you look at the way items are thrown – understandably this element is probably presented this way due to the game simply being a party game, and being able to precisely throw and catch items and pies would be extremely annoying, especially for newly spawned combatants; throwing items works similarly to charging a weapon in a game such as Worms, where you hold down a button and charge the distance of your throw – the issue here with Godheads! is that there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground, leading to you either throwing your items full-pelt across the map, or with little power at all, allowing for far more control and trial-and-error – the issue here lies in the extremely fast charge time throwing has tied to it, which only lasts around a second; as I mentioned, I can understand that this element is probably this way by choice, so I can excuse it totally, however I feel personally that by extending the charge time to a slightly longer time limit, players would be able to make more skilful and accurate plays, especially when co-ordinating with teammates over a beer or two!
During my time with Godheads!, I did encounter a couple of bugs with the PS4 version of the game; for one, only the first 10 Trials were selectable in the Trials Menu, meaning that for any Trials after I had to either go into the game and beat all the Trials one after another in an uninterrupted session, or by skipping forwards by pressing Start, then going to Next Trial – This was rather annoying, and is obviously a bug that will hopefully be fixed soon, especially as I’m a bit of a completionist and I love to see all those Gold Medal symbols shine!
Another issue I encountered revolves around the way that AI works in the game – In a few Trials and competitive matches I noticed that sometimes the AI would get stuck chasing themselves, running around in circles and jumping as if they didn’t quite know what to do, leaving me often with only one other AI opponent to worry about – The AI also seems to follow some form of priority list judged by what’s closest to themselves at the time – If a Godhead is nearby, they’d chase it ruthlessly until they captured it, or if an opponent (Or opponents) was nearby, especially with a Godhead, they’d focus on that exclusively; it’s not bad by any means, but is open to exploitation by herding opponents close to each other, having them all kill themselves whilst you run off with a Godhead in hand.
The best way I can sum it up is that the AI seems to have two modes, ringing “GODHEAD, GODHEAD, GODHEAD” and “KILL, KILL, KILL” – It’s rather apt honestly, given their robotic forms.
Another issue I had with the game is the lack of match-to-match variety, especially when you consider that only one Godhead can be on the map at any time, and the entire party has to practically vote on which Godhead gets picked for that match – I feel that a big improvement that could be made to the game is to allow all players to choose their own Godhead, letting them mess with the benefits and detriments of each; perhaps a singular mode for this would be better suited?
When I break down Oh My Godheads! to its core components, there’s not really much to talk about. That doesn’t mean the game is bad by any merit, but rather that it’s rather… simple in nature? It fits right at home with traditional party minigames such as those featured in the Mario Party franchise, however as a standalone game there’s just not much here unless you’re totally engrossed with the gameplay – especially considering an asking price of £11 currently on Steam, and a suggested price increase upon the game’s final release, I can’t honestly say for certain that Godheads! is worth the asking price based on the content on offer in the current build of the game.
I like the gameplay in Godheads!; I like the level variety and Godhead variety; I even like the soundtrack! However the slippery and somewhat limiting controls, minor bugs and current price for minimal content holds back what could be another great addition to the party game scene.
I rate Oh My Godheads! a 6/10