God's Trigger's grindhouse kitsch is effective because you can believe it was made by deeply inspired people who barely knew what they were doing. Blundering adrenaline has an unconscious authenticity which, by its nature, translates to a gnarly player experience. Misadventure is technically still an adventure.
In God’s Trigger, an angel and a demon team up for a revolt against a 70’s action cinema interpretation of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This premise grants an allowance of certain indulgences. Logic isn’t under consideration, plot progression won’t necessarily square with character motivation, and violence, while profuse, will only go as far as its budget can take it. Viewing these facets as positive or negative is a reflection of your interest in grimy pulp cinema’s translation to a slurry top-down melee/shooter twin-stick shooter.
A shortcut to God’s Trigger is to imagine if Hotline Miami’s affection for hard drugs was replaced with a fascination with hard cinema. The player moves through twenty-eight tailored levels full of strategically positioned bad guys. Some have knives while others have guns, but all will kill you in a second as soon as you enter their range of vision. God’s Trigger moves fast and demands an expert plan of attack from the player. Quick resets and generous checkpoints help ease the pain of a plot gone awry.
Two divine characters serve as God’s Trigger’s protagonists. Harry is an exiled angel with a pending grudge and Judy is an actual demon from hell, also with some kind of indiscriminate grudge. Both look and move like human beings, each with an equal but slightly different set of skills. Harry’s basic set is defined by a Holy Sword for close-quarters head bashing and a dash that can break down crumbling doors. Judy’s Infernal Chain is geared toward short-range attacks and her teleport dash can take her through porous walls. God’s Trigger’s can either be played cooperatively with another local person or solo with the ability to switch between Harry and Judy.
Greater definition comes from earning experience and developing character abilities. Special attacks—which consume a mater filled by performing stealth kills and executions—are different for Harry and Judy and provide the player with a means of circumventing God’s Trigger’s more arduous segments. Harry can turn invisible, freeze enemies, and force-push short range opponents. Judy can direct an enemy to attack their friends, create a stun vortex, and form temporary clones of herself. By earning experience, each ability comes with a series of upgrades that can extend duration, range, or cost.
Items help provide options and variation. Almost every enemy will drop their weapon. Pistols, baseball bats, machine guns, vampire stakes, and desultory divine projectiles provide limited use and maximum effect. Kicking down a door and tossing a machete at the furthest away opponent before teleport dashing to the other two in the corner is more effective strategy than trying to dance around bullets while killing all three with standard melee attacks. There’s fun to be had in experimentation.
God’s Trigger’s aligns its horsemen antagonists with an escalating series of pulpy cinema tropes. Backstage Hollywood movie sets, evil bikers, dank dungeons, and corrupted churches dominate the landscape. God’s Trigger is self-aware enough to feasibly grant angels machine guns and a horsewoman of the apocalypse a laser-shooting mech. There’s a loose set of rules guiding each theme but God’s Trigger is more than happy to forfeit logic in favor of maximizing its ridiculous set dressing.
An economical composition extends to God’s Trigger’s production value. Harry, Judy, and God’s Trigger’s monologue-ready villains all feature performances that would be a placeholder in any other game. It sounds like they got whoever was around that day to record lines. In virtually any other kind of game this would raise eyebrows but in God’s Trigger’s cornball aesthetic, it all kind of works? The entire game possesses a feeling where you’re not sure if it’s pretending to be a student-level production or if it actually is a student level production. That mystery is somewhere between a valuable asset and a Get Out of Jail Free card.
God’s Trigger’s becomes a game about narrowing the window between life and death. Some levels will seem to perfectly align all of its moving parts for a complete stealth run while other levels will feel impossible until you internalize all of its pieces and get it just right. It’s fun and it’s frustrating. There were instances where I detected genuine bullshit and other sequences where I felt a supreme sense of satisfaction over the neatly unfolded plan. It’s a haphazard combination.
There are also numerous sequences that reveal God’s Trigger’s limitations. Text size is too small to be read on a 55’’ television from five feet away. Like God of War last year, it seems as if God’s Trigger was designed and tested in an environment where the only available screen was a computer monitor. Crashes, load screens that never load anything, and frequent frame hiccups, on a PS4 Pro, also underline the God’s Trigger experience. Unlike its other ostentatious considerations, I doubt this was intentional.
A run through God’s Trigger’s campaign lasts about five hours. It also comes loaded with an arcade mode that randomizes enemy layout and loud-out. Experience earned between the two modes transfers over. Each campaign level gives the player a letter grade based on their performance. God’s Trigger also has collectibles in the form of garish magazines with actual photos of women wearing a less-than-normal amount clothing. If any other game were doing this in 2019 I would weep at gaming’s refusal to move beyond its Booth Babe level embarrassment but, well, pinup mags kind of fit with the theme here.
Perhaps some of my frustration comes from playing what was pretty clearly intended to be a cooperative game all by myself. God’s Trigger still works, I finished it without much fuss, but it loses a certain dynamic when you’re switching between characters instead of using them both simultaneously. A sniper mission, a pure stealth mission, and numerous instances where each character can slide past an exclusive door felt like chores instead of choices. God’s Trigger likely fairs better if you’re playing it with a buddy who’s all-in on its anarchic composition.
Ultimately, God’s Trigger’s grindhouse kitsch is effective because you can believe it was made by deeply inspired people who barely knew what they were doing. Blundering adrenaline has an unconscious authenticity which, by its nature, translates to a gnarly player experience. Misadventure is technically still an adventure.
