God of Rock

I give the developers of God of Rock credit for thinking outside the box and trying to combine two different genres of videogames together. A fighting game / rhythm game hybrid, God of Rock immediately interested me when I first saw the trailer. Unfortunately, the combination of two genres seemed like a great idea on paper, but the execution leaves a lot of be desired, leaving us with a game that doesn't have a ton of meat on it's bones. 

Artists from across the globe are called to compete in a tournament where the winner faces off against the God of Rock themselves. The arcade mode is the typical arcade ladder you see in fighting games where you pick a character, get an opening cinematic for their story, beat the cast one by one, beat the boss and get their ending. Sadly, the stories and motivations for each character in the game are paper thin at best. I mean we are talking about one of them wanting to to win the tournament so they can eat delicious food. One of them being kicked out of their mother's house and wanting to win to become a rock star. One of them is literally just meditating in the forest and is like "Yeah, okay, I'll join your tournament". There's not much here that made me want to finish all the characters to see their stories. The characters looks great, I'll give them that. 

As mentioned before, gameplay is a combination of both a rhythm game and a fighting game. Match the buttons presses as they cross the note chart; missing notes will cause you to take damage. The difficulty starts out pretty easy but gets more and more difficult as each song goes on, to the point where you will be doing rapid fire button presses and matches will end pretty quick at that point. The fighting game part comes in as each character will be fighting each other with health bars depleting as the song goes on. Each character also has a list of special moves they can perform during the match. You can execute these by performing combos you usually see in fighting games like down forward, down back, full circle, etc. 

The problem here is that having the note chart flowing horizontally at the bottom of the screen really forces you to watch that and only that for the entire match. In almost all my matches, I had no idea how much health I or the opponent had because I literally couldn't look anywhere else. My eyes were only able to focus on the note chart the entire game, so I couldn't even see the characters fighting on the screen either.

Some of the notes are incredibly difficult to hit. I played this game on an Xbox controller and there are times where you would have to hit the X and B buttons together at the same time, or X and Y so your thumbs are going to get a good workout playing this. Seeing as this is part fighting game, I think I can see what they were going for and while I didn't have one to use, I feel like the best way to play this game would be with a fight stick. I feel like playing with a fight stick would make pressing all the button combos as well as pulling off the special moves a lot easier. You can remap the controls, and a nice feature is that there are different default button combinations specifically for various controllers from Xbox, PlayStation Dual Shock and Dual Sense, Nintendo Switch, or you can play with the keyboard with the arrow keys. 

Since this is a rhythm game, the music is one of the most important parts of the game, and it's hit and miss here. There are some memorable tunes, but for the most part a lot of them sound generic and forgettable. These aren't tunes that are going to make you want to go back to play the stage over and over again. There are also no licensed tracks, and aside from potential mods, there doesn't appear on the PC version to be any way to add your own songs. 

Aside from the arcade mode, the only other mode in the game is multiplayer with both local and online play with both ranked and casual matches. There is also a training mode and a level editor, where you can select a background, a song from the game, and then you can create your own note chart. It's nice that this feature is in the game, and I'm sure there are a lot of people that could get some use out of it. For me though, this isn't really something that I would play with again. I played around for it a bit but that was it. 

God of Rock has an interesting premise, and on paper the idea of combining a rhythm game and a fighting game seems like a good idea. Unfortunately the execution here left a lot to be desired. The way the game plays out makes it incredibly difficult to actually see what's going on. It's a shame too, because the game looks absolutely gorgeous with tons of bright colors that pop. The cast is a diverse cast that all look unique and the character models looks great. I didn't really find any bugs or glitches either, so it's a well made game, it's just that the game itself wasn't that much fun to play. It got old quickly, and without that many modes or memorable music it's not something that I can see myself going back to in the future.