Godus is a free-to-play mobile game about being a god and using your powers to shape the land and help the people. Although it is creative, it falls short on many other aspects.
What Is Godus
This mobile game caught my interest because of a game that I played on SNES called Actraiser.
Godus, although I thought that it might be similar, was not at all. It was unique in its style, aesthetic, and controls.
Throughout the game, you give commands to your followers and in return, they worship you, giving you things that can be used to level your powers up.
The game has interesting controls. Because it is on mobile, there are limits to what you can do. You use your finger to mold the land in ways to benefit your followers.
Two fingers allow you to move the camera around. Pinching and spreading your fingers allow you to zoom in and out.
How Is The Game
I must admit, starting out, I loved the game despite some of the flaws of the control system. The longer I played, it started to become a problem.
Even knowing that touch on mobile is always wonky when trying to make finer adjustments, I think that a point-and-click model would have been better overall.
A large part of the game is using your finger to mold the earth for your followers yet there are times that molding doesn’t work and you wind up wasting your belief.
This brings me to another issue. Belief is basically an in-game currency of sorts. You gain more of it the more followers you have and it is generated every so often.
In free-to-play games, I give them the benefit of knowing that they have to implement microtransactions somewhere to make their money.
The way that it is implemented in this game is not the best. Usually, you play a free-to-play game to a certain point.
At that point, the game jumps a bit in difficulty and makes you think about buying the booster or help packs for a few bucks.
In this game, that point came very early in the game. When you get to the point where you need to mold higher elevations, it eats up your belief at a rapid pace.
This leaves you with two choices. Wait until the game naturally regenerates your belief or buy belief with a few bucks.
I chose the third option, which is to stop playing. Although the cost of belief isn’t that much, I think that it runs out fast and there is nothing about the game that makes me want to keep playing past that point.
There are many cool ideas and concepts in the game, yet I think that at times, the game tries to be too creative for its own good.
I would like to see this game tweaked in some ways or even make the microtransactions less intrusive.
There are many games out there that do the free-to-play model well that makes it where you don’t mind spending the money to support the game.