Godrop is a new roguelite in which you play as ‘Gotrop’ an alien weapon being utilised to invade planet Earth.
Roguelite games are ten a penny at the minute, so to stand out each of them has to have a unique mechanic. That mechanic in Godrop, is that it’s all about ramming. Instead of traditional weapons, all your ship can do is ram straight into the enemies.
Pressing the ‘transform’ button turns your ship into a ghost like figure, able to ram into enemies and destroy them. Smaller enemies are destroyed almost instantly, whereas larger enemies have more health. With these, you continue piercing them until they blow up. They often have weak points inside the ship you can target for maximum explosiveness.
But, transforming drains energy. When you are in a non-transformed state, you are slow and vulnerable to attack. Transforming not only lets you attack but massively increases speed and manoeuvrability, this is essential to avoid the bullet hell style situations later levels place you in. Therefore you have to go against your gaming instincts to boost only to dodge, as in this game that will mean you can’t attack. It’s a fun trade-off and definitely adds the pressure.
Of course, being a roguelite there are plenty of upgradeables. There are standard ones which increase health, energy, defence, speed and attack power. Then there are some more specialist ones which increase certain stats like knockback or recharge rate. Then further on there are even more specific ones such as life steal, or modifications to your weapons that let you leave a stream of light or lose piercing ability in favour of ramming.
This large array of different collectables means there are loads of different builds that you can enjoy and each run will feel different depending on the path you go down. After defeating the enemies in each room, you are given the choice of where to go next. Interestingly, each path is defined by the upgrade you’ll get at the end of it. So you can choose the path with an upgrade for your attack, or defence. This means that you can properly define the upgrade path you want to go down as the choices are much more in your control than the more random way most roguelites hand out loot.
On the visual side, the graphics are 3D rendered on a 2D plane, with lots of different ships and asteroids floating about. There are a few anime pictures here and there, and of course when things get hectic there are loads of bullets and lasers flying about. In these sort of games I sometimes find it difficult to discern the player character amongst all the madness, but I had no such problem with Godrop, it manages to keep the player properly highlighted throughout.
Later levels feature huge bosses which are great fun to fight. It’s not all perfect though. The game has a problem with refresh rate, and I couldn’t get vsync to work properly. Of the four main levels in the standard run, there isn’t a huge amount of variety in terms of enemies or backgrounds. There’s also quite a few translation mistakes, but none that cause any problems.
I’m willing to forgive the shortcomings though, as this game is only £3.86 at time of publication. That’s a great price, it’s the type of game you might play for half hour here and there and you’ll get a lot of fun out of it, it’s really good value, and a game I would be happy to recommend.
You can purchase Godrop on Steam here. If you’re after a different kind of roguelite, perhaps check out Rogue Lords
