Even though the concept of smiting evil-doers from above with bolts of lightning sounds like a good time, God Strike ends up being of the most monotonous and offensive games I’ve played on my iPhone to date.
Even though the concept of smiting evil-doers from above with bolts of lightning sounds like a good time, God Strike ends up being of the most monotonous and offensive games I’ve played on my iPhone to date.
God Strike draws you in with a driving rock guitar tune that, admittedly, got me really excited to play. The hand-drawn graphics look like the game is going to be fun, with lots of different baddies to smite. And though there are technically six different types of nasties to strike, with 13 different lightning patterns, God Strike manages to make you uncomfortable right from the get-go.
The tutorial encourages you to “punish the bastards with the lightning.” I had to read that a few times. They didn’t really call the enemies in God Strike bastards, did they? Sure enough, as I played, the game made sure to tell me that I was indeed killing bastards. These bad guys range from escaped prisoners to bank robbers, but nonetheless, it was more than a little off-putting.
To smite the bad guys, you need to trace a line from the dark cloud above to the ground below. Though there are, as mentioned, apparently 13 different lightning strikes, none of them behave particularly uniquely.
Enemies travel horizontally across the screen. Miss one, and an obnoxious angel pops up to tell me “You missed one bastard!” and a heart from your life gauge disappears. Miss enough of them and it’s game over. The OpenFeint achievements range from how many baddies in a row you killed, to the total kill count and how many you kill at once.
To be blunt, other than the cool tune in this soundtrack and quirky graphics style, there is nothing redeemable about this game. The enemies only blindly go horizontally, with the only variable being speed. Rubbing your finger up and down on the touchscreen is not enough of a gameplay mechanic to be fun. This is doubly true as the lightning doesn’t even always strike where you want it to, leaving bad guys to just keep traipsing across the screen. There is only one mode, a non-stop arcade mode of smiting these boring baddies. And a game that simply rates based on a kill count, coupled with the horrendous name for the bad guys, doesn’t have anything worth spending your time or money on.
In short, God Strike is an example of the mysteries of the Apple App approval process. With descriptions about the app including such gems as “Punish bastards with a lightning!” someone somewhere should have noticed something was amiss. God Strike manages to be a dynamic duo of failure: boring and offensive. Steer clear of this false god.
