Introduction
God Damn The Garden is a retro style FPS that was developed by indie studio Angelvik. It was released on PC in December 2021 and Ratalaika Games ported it to consoles in October 2022.
*Disclaimer: A code was provided from the publisher for the purpose of this review. This does not affect anything as my thoughts are mine and mine alone.
Video Review
Review
Do you want to become the next new god of the Badass Kingdom? Well if you find your way out of this pit that you get tossed down into, you just may be able to be! Now get to shooting and slaying and dying a whole lot and if you actually reach the end, it will have all been for nothing! Yay!
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This game has literally no story. I had no idea what my motivations were the entire time I played it and the dialogue…oh my god the dialogue was so bad. It felt like someone made a meme character, and then tried to base a game around it, but kept that personality for literally every character in the game. The dialogue is filled with spelling errors, grammar errors, and it felt like I was reading the work of someone who spends way too much time on meme sites. I’m surprised I didn’t end up seeing the phrase “wtf lulz random!” shoved into the bowels of this monstrosity.
The gameplay isn’t any better than the terrible dialogue we get in the game, so there’s no sense looking here for any redeeming qualities. You get one gun. As you kill bosses you get the ability to change what kind of bullets this gun shoots. So eventually you have normal bullets, bombs…and throwing axes. Yes that’s right, you shoot throwing axes from your gun. You toggle them by pressing L2, or LT or the number buttons if you’re on a PC. How do I know all this? Well when I first obtained a new weapon by killing a boss, it didn’t show the correct prompt on the tutorial text, because apparently the developer didn’t want it to, and if I tried to aim by swiping my finger on the touchpad, also another terrible idea, it would switch to the text for PC!
Enemies take multiple bullets to kill, and you don’t get an autofire for your gun. So you’re left just smashing your finger against whatever the hell you’re using to play. This felt terrible especially when there were so many enemies coming at you at once. Oh you can hold the button down for charge shots, but it only ended up shooting maybe a dozen bullets at once, when I could do it faster. Got a fast trigger finger? Well too bad for you, because the gun can only shoot so fast!
I died so many times playing this game. It became very unfun. A lot of the enemies can kill you in either one hit or two. So I was left wondering why I even have a health bar if the game is just this brutal. It doesn’t help that the enemies just run straight towards you no matter what, and the tight corridors and areas that are filled with too much random shit impede your ability to walk backwards and shoot at the same time. There was even one area that I had enemies not spawn properly. I could hear them, I could see their dust trails, but I couldn’t kill them. I was happy to run through the area though. There was an enemy that you couldn’t hear no matter what. No sound queue, no nothing, and it was a hand that dropped from the ceiling and would just destroy your health bar. No matter what I did to try and dodge it, or be fast, it would most likely hit me. Hell, one time it hit me while I was in a doorway!
During a boss fight, and this is my biggest complaint, it spawns enemies in holes in the walls. If you die and come back to this boss, you cannot see the enemies in these holes in the walls, but they are still there, and they could still shoot at you, but you cannot kill them at all. Even restarting the game didn’t fix this issue. So the boss was so unbelievably difficult because of this ridiculous bug. Afterwards I was half unsure of where to go because I had no map. Sure the game is small in scope, but having a map could’ve helped IMMENSELY! Also, thanks for teaching me the controls!
Rating
Pros:
- Nil
Cons:
- The Entire Game!
Summary
This game literally has zero redeeming qualities. But I don’t think it’s fair to give a game a zero out of ten, because zero isn’t on the board on a sliding scale. There are so many more better designed games out there, especially in the FPS genre that aren’t incredibly buggy or stupidly ridiculous for literally no reason other than to be edgy and cool. Just look at the heap of crap coming out of the NPCs mouths and you’ll have a pure reflection of this game. Go elsewhere.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: Angelvik
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: Ratalaika Games
Publisher Socials: Twitter
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