There are little more appealing game assumptions than killing a series of giant monsters by climbing them like moving mountains to snatch a death blow from above. And yet, there are also a few more disappointing experiences than this premise that is as short as in Pray for the Gods. This giant kill adventure tries to capture the magic of the classic PlayStation Shadow of the Colossus, but misses the mark with sloppy controls, fake deaths and bugs that manage to waste some solid boss encounters.
It’s not hard to spot the inspiration taken from Shadow of the Colossus: in Pray for the Gods you will travel in a desolate open world, keep huge monsters away, and probably quite confused by the story. Where the comparison stops is in the incredibly sloppy mechanics and its dubious design choices.
The most absurd of them all is how unresponsive and awkward everything feels, from climbing to fighting. It feels like it takes about a second for your character to respond to everything you do, which made me kill a lot at first. Eventually my brain adapted to the lag and it became less of a problem, but every time I put the controller down and picked it up again later, I had to retrain myself. As you can imagine, a lag in a battle-focused game where you can be killed in one blow is a recipe for a lot of rage, and even if I did acclimatize to it sometimes, it never ceased to be frustrating.
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It certainly does not help that I was in shock all the time from the things that killed me during boss fights. Basically, every time one of the giants attacks they create a shock wave in the immediate vicinity that inflicts tons of damage, knocks you to the ground for what feels like an eternity, and is just completely cheap. There were times when I was clearly a few meters away from an incoming attack and my character went down to the ground as if I were a FIFA player trying to commit an offense on the colossus that attacked me. Combined with the slow controls, there were many times when my death felt completely unfair For a slow-motion replay of that blatant malark.
Climbing giant animals is supposed to be the main title of the gods, but because you move so incredibly slowly, and the controls for climbing are so inconsistent, it’s often more annoying than fun. You will be caught on random surfaces while moving and will have to frantically shake your finger stick until you are released, or start climbing in the wrong direction for no apparent reason and struggle to regain control. Sometimes you even just fall from everything you climbed while you still have standing strength and will fall to your death in a fit of pure rage. Given how much time you spend climbing Pray for the Gods, these nuisances end up haunting you almost every step of the way through a short five-hour game.
These problems blend in with the existing little nuisances associated with this type of game in the worst way possible – things like how you are constantly disturbed by the animal shaking you like a rag doll and having to monitor your endurance meter all the time. There is nothing worse than finally getting on an animal and getting to an area where you can inflict damage, only to be repeatedly disturbed while you are undermined until you finally run out of endurance and fall back to the ground. The problems with climbing mechanics take these rare stimuli and make them completely outrageous.
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You will also spend a lot of your time stumbling everywhere, because every time your character breathes so much it loses its balance, rolls to the ground, then lifts itself back up and makes its way back. It takes a few seconds at a time and the animation is repeated many times back to back when, for example, a giant monster walks nearby. It’s so, so annoying, that even though it made me laugh the first few times it happened, the longer I played it filled me with unbearable rage.
As if that’s not enough, Praey for the Gods also explores the limits of patience with technical fatigue. Mostly minor, like Primer instability on PS5 or that time I was knocked out because it passed an object in the world and did not bring me with it, but I also experienced three severe crashes while playing, including one that I lost quite a bit of progress. I did not encounter enough bugs to make me flip a desktop, but when combined with an already crazy game it only adds to this general feeling of lack of polish that became more and more disturbing as I played longer.
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Open world combat has many of the same complaints as climbing, including feeling retarded to controls and your character having a hard time standing up, but it has the added nuisance in the form of weapons so fragile that they feel like they are made from fine China. I’m not one of those people who claims that Breath of the Wild is a bad game because of the durability of the weapon, but dear sir, here is your weapon shattering to pieces after so few uses that most of the time I just ran past enemies for fear of wasting time gathering resources to create new resources. (You do not get XP from battle, so why bother?)
And even when your weapons are still not broken, if they have reached low durability they do significantly less damage, which causes the battle to lengthen and cause so much frustration that fighting is not so good in the first place. Waving weapons at skeletal enemies or aiming at animals you hunt with a bow and arrow is inaccurate, costs valuable resources, and rarely helps you achieve your goal of shooting down all eight bosses.
