Almighty: Kill Your Gods Is No Where Near Ready For Prime-Time

Killing gods is a shockingly common theme in modern pop culture. If it's not Kratos ripping Helios' head off for a flashlight, it's the cast of Undead Unluck trying their hardest to take down just one god before the world ends. If you've got a booming voice and omniscience, you should probably watch your back. Almighty: Kill Your Gods is an action-RPG/base-building game that turns you into a deicidal maniac, bent on tearing your gods down from their pedestal and, in the process, putting yourself on top of it instead. 

Almighty: Kill Your Gods starts out with you in a pile of your dead friends. A giant floating wolf head then resurrects you and turns you into a demi-god with amazing combat abilities, and tells you to save your people and defend your island home, because of course he does. From that point on you have to run around your island, slaughtering enemies, saving comrades, and collecting resources. You then spend those resources on unlocking new buildings with special abilities for your island's tower to increase your own god-like powers. 

There's something about Almighty: Kill Your Gods that gives me strong vibes of the original Black & White. Maybe it's the floating deity that exposits things for you, maybe it's the fact that the game is about being a god and is set mainly on islands, but I think the most likely answer is that it has a tutorial that seems to go on forever. It's understandable for a game with complicated mechanics to need a lot of explaining, but I can't help but feel like they should have considered spacing out the different tutorial segments a bit. 

Even if you ignore the drawn-out tutorial, the actual gameplay doesn't do the game any favors either. You have various options to take out your enemies, including gauntlets that mostly shoot things, a melee attack, and various ways of combining your melee attack with other abilities to do different things. Not a single one of your attacks feels particularly satisfying to use, at all. The gauntlets are either too weak or too slow. Your standard melee attack barely seems to hit anything, and your running attack relies so heavily on your tiny mana meter that it's almost useless. 

The only attack that has any utility is your ground pound because it gets stronger the higher up you use it from. This ground pound is how I defeated 99% of the enemies I came across, making for an incredibly boring experience. Part of the reason that this was necessary is that as much as the developers may have tried to claim otherwise, Almighty is not a game that you can play on your own. While it's technically possible to play the game without anyone else (there's even an offline mode), there are several game mechanics that make it clear the game is intending you to team up with your friends. 

When you run out of health, you have a timer that shows you're dying, rather than immediately dropping dead. This is presumably so your friends have a chance to res you without needing to respawn. Enemies wander the group randomly and in varying levels of strength, and in most cases they're determined to stop you from performing tasks. If you had a party of friends keeping the enemies' attention away from you it might actually be possible to finish half of the quests or menial tasks properly. 

Ignoring questing and tasks for now, how does the base building part of the game work? Well, as mentioned before, you collect resources from the various islands that make up the game world. You do this either by killing enemies or by destroying various crystals and rocks that dot the landscape. You then have to do something strange with a portal, and you get resources. If that sounds a little bit vague, it's because I have absolutely no idea what that portal does, but I am assured it is "extracting resources."

Either way, when you get back to your home island, you can spend these resources to improve your island in various ways. You can repair and build structures to increase your power, economy or defense, and can add new levels to your own tower to increase your god-like attributes. Every so often an enemy raiding party will show up and try to wreck up the place a bit, and you need to make sure your defenses are able to push the enemies back or your island will take damage. 

The building elements in Almighty: Kill Your Gods work fine. There's not really much else to say about them. You collect the resources, then go to a building spot on your island or in your tower, press a button, and it springs into existence or gets better. In the current version of the game, the whole 'building' part just feels too directed. There's not really much customizability or personality to anything you can construct, and in the end, your island will look almost exactly like all of the others no matter what you do. 

Not that I think the building being better would make the game any less tedious. You'd still be running around islands that all look the same, blasting away at enemies and resources with the same attacks that don't feel like they have any weight behind them. The story seems almost non-existent and the parts I did manage to grasp just felt like pointless fantasy fluff. The thing that really tied the entire experience together was the fact that the game was constantly breaking, so even if I had wanted to play it I probably wouldn't have been able to. 

At various points, characters phased through walls or ragdolled off of cliffs. Once, while I was being attacked by a werewolf, I sunk through the floor and somehow managed to end up in the sea. The controller support just straight up doesn't work because there are no button prompts and after trying every single button on the controller I couldn't even activate my ultimate ability when it was called for. 

Overall, Almighty: Kill Your Gods doesn't feel like it lives up to the epic nature its name implies. It's all well and good going on about killing gods, but when the game feels like an MMO with little personality and even fewer players then it's hard to feel very enthralled by it all. Hopefully, as time goes by the game will get into a more playable state but I won't be holding my breath in all honesty. Not with an 'upgrade account' notification on the main menu making me very suspicious about the game's future plans. 

TechRaptor covered Almighty: Kill Your Gods on PC via Steam with a code from the publishers. The game is currently available in Early Access.