God's Trigger

Review

Well, depending on your belief, when you take your last breath, you may end up either in Paradise or in Hell. It could be helpful to write your good deeds and not-so-good deeds on a slate in order to evaluate where you might be going in the afterlife. Of course, that would be very a subjective evaluation, but if you had no time to reflect and the Apocalypse was about to occur, what would you do? I guess you’d be praying for a miracle. Well, you’ve been heard! Heaven and Hell have combined forces to defy the archangel Gabriel’s plan to start the Apocalypse in God’s Trigger!

God’s Trigger is a top down shooter game developed by One More Level and published by Techland Publishing, where you control an angel and a demon to save humankind from the apocalypse.

The game is composed of a prologue containing two tutorial missions and five chapters, each involving five missions. You can play either solo or with a friend with the local co-op option.

The story is that the Archangel Gabriel has taken over Purgatory and Heaven and sent four horsemen to Earth to initiate the Apocalypse. Harry the angel and Judy the demoness must eliminate each of the horsemen before they can go back to Heaven and face the ultimate fight against Gabriel.  Before you get back to Heaven, your unlikely duo will be fighting their way through a western movie set, a dungeon, a factory and a military base, and let me tell you, it will be hectic from the start.  

In the single player mode, you’ll be swapping between Harry and Judy quite often throughout the gameplay. Each character has personal skills, a main weapon and 5 powerups. On many occasions, you might find yourself stuck; for example, if you haven’t found a lever or pressure plate to activate a door. If there is a crack on one wall, Harry will be able to go through it with his powerful dash while Judy can teleport herself from one room to another, but only if the two rooms are divided by a wall of bars.

Most of the rooms that your characters enter hold many enemies, and therein lies the fun and frustration. Harry has a sword as a main weapon while Judy has some sort of chain with a grapple at the end of it, which is deadly affective! However, you must be fast and precise in your attacks; if you are hit once, you die, and you’ll be restarting at your last checkpoint.  As you slash your way through your enemies, you’ll get experience points as well as energy. This will charge the bar which is located around the character’s avatar at the bottom left corner of your screen. When it’s fully charged, you’ll be able to use one of five skills that Harry or Judy has at hand (if you’ve unlocked them, of course). In any case, you start with one skill for each of your characters. Don’t forget to pick up your fallen enemies’ weapons, as they could prove to be extremely handy in the next room. To make the battle even more intense there will also be a few obstacles to worry about in some of the levels, but I’ll let you discover them. You’ll be dying an awful lot in this game and might occasionally swear at the demoness and the angel! (Oops, that’s a negative point on my slate.)

The levels are very well-designed, with a collectable to find in each one, in addition to large, strange crates; the blues crates will free souls and give you plenty of experience points while the golden one has perks for your characters, but they will not be easy to find.  Make sure to destroy wooden boxes, vases, benches and more, as they might have hidden energy, additional ammunition, and/or experience points.  

As I am back in Heaven in my gameplay, I have successfully defeated four of the bosses; I must admit, it took me quite a while to pass each of them, but once you’ve figured out the sequences, they are beatable pretty quickly.

When a level is completed, you be judge on how fast you actually went through the stage, how many times your characters died, the maximum combo kill and if you found the collectable.

Graphically it looks great and the game runs well. You might have issues starting the game if you are using the virus software, F-secure, like myself, but they have a post on how to resolve the issue on the game website.  You’ll have access to three different control settings, including the gamepad, which has three options (default, alternative and aggressive). If you like playing with the keyboard, you can re-bind the keys to suit you.