Developer: Krafted Games

Publisher: Krafted Games

Platform: Nintendo Switch (eShop)

Category: First Person, Action & Adventure

Release Date: August 17, 2018 (EU & NA)

Not as god-like.

Polygod by Krafted Games is a first-person action/strategy game that drops you into random maps stocked with enemies, hazards, and occasional boss battles in a rouge-like shooter that demands precision. Krafted Games previously released Polygod on Steam and has now released it on Switch. The set up for the game has you fighting enemies through randomly generated worlds as you work through the Trial of the Gods.

There isn’t much of a story to Polygod and what little there is, can be easily missed. In the first section of the game, you meet some NPCs that tell of your journey as the Faceless One needing to overcome the trial while surviving the onslaught of enemies. You also learn of the Gia and upgrades through altars where you can sell the souls you have collected.

I will be honest in saying that the first few times I dropped into the game I felt like I was more confused than ever as to what my main objective was. In the end, your goal is just to survive and shoot everything that moves. The game doesn’t really tell you or show you anything and since you’re trying to not die, discovering what you need to do can be difficult.

There are a few modes in Polygod like split screen games that pit you against your friend, but I found these to be the least fun as they were over quickly and offered little variety in terms of settings. There is the ability to replay certain sections of the game if you save the seed, but there is not much of an explanation as to what you are to do and how much you are saving. Ultimately I just found myself playing the main game and jumping into a new run each time.

Polygod doesn’t have a lot of sounds in it. Mostly it’s just some enemy sounds and your never ending blaster that you will hear over and over again. This is a bit depressing in my opinion as the variety of enemies doesn’t always match up with the sounds you expect to hear in a game like Polygod.

Music is also mostly lacking, as the game’s levels, while randomly generated, always seems to play the same synthesized music. Nothing stood at to me as setting the mood, except when the mood is frantic and there are multiple enemies on the screen. Why there’s not more of a variety in the sound and audio department is a baffling almost overlooked part of the game.

Polygod is not a game I will be coming back to. In fact, at the time of this review, I am already planning to delete the game from my Switch memory card to make room for more engrossing and impressive games. My main gripes with Polygod is that there is very little direction or motivation into what it is that you’re supposed to do or feel as you play through each level. The randomness of audio cues as enemies pop in and out of your view was also something that I had a hard time understanding.

The game looks decent enough with its low poly cell-shaded like approach to its world design. The enemies and bosses are ok and varied for what they are, but without a feeling of hit detection and an overly sensitive aiming reticle I just found the game to be sort of hit or miss in most of the typical FPS style games.

Conclusion:

The game is hard, but I feel like the difficulty is more because of how clunky running and jumping and shooting is than anything. Some enemies or bosses have a bullet-hell approach where you’re being shot at by all angles without a rhyme or reason to the design of the creatures and where bullets are coming from. The oddities in this game far outweigh my desire to venture further with the game.