Oh My Godheads

Oh My Godheads is a fast and frenetic capture the flag-type game for 1-4 players, developed by Titutitech and published by Square Enix. The point of the game is to capture godheads and place them on plinths for points before the other team can kill you. The only problem is the godheads have a will and mind of their own, and won't always be team players. There are ten different godheads based on different mythologies (Norse and Egyptian among them), and they all have their own personalities and quirks. And attacks. One head might explode if you hold it too long. Another will freeze you solid. A third is too heavy to lift and can only be rolled. You get the drift.

The game has four different modes - Capture the Head, King of the Head, Headhunters, and Last Man Standing. In Capture the Head you have to, you guessed it, capture heads and put them on plinths. In King of the Head you only have to hold on to a head for as long as you can (and hope you don't get the exploding one). Headhunters is a free-for-all where whoever gets the most kills wins. In Last Man Standing you don't technically have to kill anyone, you just gotta be the one that survives the longest.

Oh My Godheads has a lot of different levels set in a lot of different places - from a waterfall in Japan, to a volcano in Italy, via remote tropical islands. All the levels have different types of terrain, as well as different challenges. Big rolling boulders, cliffs, traps, you name it. It also has a lot of different characters you can play as, for example, there's a penguin in a top hat and monocle.

Visually speaking the game is very charming, with low-poly environments and characters, bright colours, and a pleasant soundtrack. It looks good, and seemingly promises a few hours of goofy and funny entertainment. Too bad it doesn't make good on that promise. It's too bad because this game should have been right up our alley, but somehow it never manages to rise above mediocre.

It only takes about half an hour before we got annoyed, and worse... bored. That's a cardinal sin for a game like this. We can forgive poor graphics, a silly story, or ugly characters as long as we're having fun. As long as we are entertained. But Oh My Godheads failed in that aspect, and its flaws grew more plentiful and more aggravating as a result.

Yes, we have ten very different levels to choose from, but they are so small we always end up running in a straight line, which ensures that the battles grow repetitive, fast. The controls are slightly off and feel imprecise. We often ended up running in circles like a maniac when try to kill someone on the opposite team, because the game didn't know how to handle precise movements. This got really frustrating as the levels got more challenging, especially when we ran off a cliff by accident for the umpteenth time. In addition, the way the levels are set up sort of ruins the gameplay. Your adversaries spawn instantly by the plinth on which you have to place the godhead, and can just wait there, kill you, and then steal the godhead. But then you spawn instantly right by their plinth, and then you can just wait, kill them when they get close, and steal the godhead. And round and round it goes, where it will end, nobody knows. You move the godhead one inch at a time only to be pushed back, for all eternity, like some virtual Sisyphus, until you perish out of boredom.

To add insult to injury, the artificial intelligence in the game isn't particularly intelligent, so tactics and strategy are out the window. This problem is solved by playing with real live humans, but still... And the way the game camera moves doesn't help at all, zooming in and out randomly, making it hard to tell which character it is that you're controlling. These are just the problems we had with one of the modes, Capture the Head, and that was, frankly, the best of the bunch. In Last Man Standing all you have to do is wait for the other imbeciles to kill each other off, and then you win by default. Very boring in the long run.

Oh My Godheads has an exciting premise that we really liked, as well as some charming visuals, but in the end that just wasn't enough. This game fell flat for us, which is a shame, really, since we wanted to like it.