Cast of the seven Godsends is a run and gun platform game developed by indie studio Raven Travel studios and published by Merge games. Currently only available for PC and Mac platforms, it is planned to be released onto consoles? Well, who knows?
The game takes place in the world of Dareca where the kingdom’s heir is kidnapped by the evil emperor Zaraaima after killing the king Kandar, since the heir being a baby and apparently no available guards or soldiers being around and the queens seeming to give as much care about the child’s safety as destruction derby racers care about the environment it means it is up to kandar to go rescue him. However, he is dead, right? No worries, the magical power of the seven deities of the realm who have not just revived him, but also given him the ability to wear six different armours to fight through the malicious hordes of minions under the emperors Zaraaima’s baby-napping service. A lot of the story is given with talks with bosses so if you are not a fast reader you might want to hold off with slamming the action button constantly. By this I don’t mean that there is a horrendous amount of text to read, in-fact quite the opposite. It is more that it is incredibly easy to skip many of these moments accidentally. I am kind of disappointed in the story or, what I have played of it so far, as there seems to be nothing in it. You are pissed so you go kill the sorcerer, ancient evil emperor villainy thing that has kidnapped your son. But, that’s it. We do not get interesting characters or even any knowledge about this world we are supposed to be absorbed by. I know there is a deeper plot and the fact that it is the heir that has been kidnapped is probably integral to that, however it still feels lacking in any real depth at all.
The mechanics are simple. The controls, simplicity probably helps this as there are only really two buttons which are left alt to fire your weapon and space to jump. Oh, and of course arrow keys to move. This is unless you use a controller or mess about with the controls which I recommend as playing with the default controllers left me with a screwed up hand muscles from hammering the buttons with just two fingers for an hour or two. However, if the fire button is held after obtaining a weird rainbow coloured orb, then you can activate one of the armours the deities of Dareca have bestowed upon you. Each of these armours are fairly straight forward, the fire deity lets you fire, fire, the green deity lets you whip enemies with a vine and throw rose darts at the horde of demons attacking you and a purple dude who throws mutant frogs to kill his enemies. Yep, and un-dead giant flies. However, it is not just the armour that can be changed as you can pick up different weapons to use such as a sword, shurikens and a massive hammer which are just a couple of the five or six weapons you can use. As mentioned, these differ some of what the armours attack with too. If that is not enough to squash your foes then you can also use a special move which is different for each activated armour.
The levels are pretty straight forward as your objective is getting to the end killing everything you can. Which is fun and a simple objective that anyone can understand, and with the checkpoints spread very fairly across each of the maps meaning when you die you still feel like you have made progress. The bosses that you encounter along the way are great to fight to as they balance that frustrating mad dance across the screen with that rewarding feeling when you cut their head off. However, there are issues I have with this. Although there are checkpoints spread across the game you cannot save and exit and come back. Nope, you have to play the game in one sitting or see how far you get before you come across the amazing immortal flower of the oddly booby trapped windmill. I know the game is going for the whole arcade feel with the play till you drop, however it would be nice if it gave you an option to leave and continue. I do not think any game should punish a person for having something suddenly more important to do, I mean Castlevania mirror of shadows allowed you to stop pretty much anywhere and still had a boss rush mode so that if you really wanted to go for an epic challenge than you could. A system like that could be really helpful here.
Visually the game is great, the different armours that you use all look great and you feel a real buzz when you activate them, and all the weapons visual variety will be like sweet sugary candy for the eyes. Also the environments you traverse in order to reach the evil emperor Zaraaima are great to run through and fit the score written for the levels well. I have to admit there were no outstanding tracks for me, but, by that I do not mean the score sucks. Just that I would not call it outstanding
Overall the game is fun to play- even if it is a bit frustrating at times. If you like 2d run and platform games and love the retro arcade feel then this is for you. However, as I said if you do not have the time to sit down and play for a good couple of hours straight, then you will really struggle with getting anywhere in this game. It just seems to me in today’s world hard-core arcade style games cannot survive if they purely stick to the formula. There is a reason I have consoles and not arcade cabinets.
Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.
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