Godbreakers is a multiplayer roguelike with some interesting ideas but a lot to prove. It’s coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC later this year and hoping to reverse a recent trend of underwhelming games by parent publisher Thunderful, which was just purchased by Atari amid its latest round of layoffs.
Godbreakers is a third-person action game in which you brawl your way through short levels to take on big arena boss fights. You can do it solo or in squads of up to four players, with loot and upgrades to collect along the way. One of the key things differentiating Godbreakers in a fun but overcrowded genre is a mechanic that allows players to explode low-health enemies and steal their powers. The one-shot abilities offer DPS, crowd control, and other benefits with the potential to augment the usual roguelike buildcrafting with an extra layer of strategy.
I played a recent demo that left me intrigued but somewhat unconvinced. The action is fairly tight, with cancelable animations, responsive dodge dashing, and some crisp combos, including a fun slide attack that feels surprisingly good for this type of game. But the demo didn’t leave me with a good sense of the overall flow of a playthrough, or whether levels will be less boring and more visually interesting in the finished game. A loadout menu back at the home base before launching missions also showed cosmetics for customizing character appearances, along with possible ambitions for the game that the demo that I played seemed nowhere close to supporting.
Ultimately, whether Godbreakers can turn a bullet point list of decent but familiar gameplay ideas into a fun co-op arcade roguelike experience will come down to how the loot, upgrades, and RNG-fueled progression of each run feels. That’s one of the more difficult things to get a sense of from a short demo, and it’s also the one quality that’s often make-or-break for roguelikes without a strong visual style or other distinctive qualities. In other words, my time with the demo gave me a sense of a version of Godbreakers that could be worth making time for, but I’m not sure that’s a version that can launch in the next few months.
The game is being made by To The Sky, a recently formed team led by an ex-EA development director named Jugo Mirkovic, and which Thunderful, publisher of the SteamWorld series and other games, purchased back in 2021. “We shopped around with this game quite a bit,” he told Kotaku during a recent developer presentation. “The premise of the game is still kind of similar to what we pitched, but we found the fluidity and the gameplay a bit after we pitched the game. We wanted to pitch a combat kind of action, melee, roguelike. That’s what we pitched. But we ended up with something a lot more fluid, and that surprised even us.”
The studio stresses that Godbreakers is very much gameplay-first, which certainly comes across in the demo. But these days, games that aren’t firing on all cylinders—story, art, unique mechanics—can be hard to make time for when there are dozens of new games coming out every week. Thunderful also published Reignbreaker earlier this year, a neat-looking punk take on Hades that struggled to connect with enough players. The studio behind it shut down before it even released. Lost in Random: The Eternal Die, a roguelike spin-off of the whimsical gothic adventure from 2021, faced a similar uphill battle. One negative review praised the look and gameplay but said the progression during each new run felt too shallow to stick with.
Thunderful blamed weak sales of The Eternal Die for its latest round of layoffs announced on Tuesday. “It is unfortunate to have to implement further operational measures that affect some of our colleagues,” Thunderful chairman Patrick Svensk told investors. “At the same time, I am convinced that this is the right path for Thunderful to create an efficient organization within the publishing business where our announced release pipeline remains intact.”
Amid rising debt, Atari (back from the dead again, this time maybe for good) announced today that it has taken a controlling stake in Thunderful for just $5 million. That bargain bin price comes after years of great games—Viewfinder, Planet of Lana, SteamWorld Heist 2—that didn’t do well enough to make up for all of the other missed bets. Hopefully, Godbreakers can end up bucking that trend instead of becoming the latest casualty of it.
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