Review: God’s Trigger Deliriously Gratifies the Player’s Thirst for Schlock

The game takes delight in its over-the-top violence, cheesy monologues, and nonsensical plot.

God's Trigger
Photo: Techland Publishing

Some games don’t aspire to be sprawling epics, like Witcher 3: The Hunt and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as they have a different idea of greatness, if not pleasure. Take, for instance, Journey and David O’Reilly’s Mountain, which suggest miniature art-house films for the way they lean heavily on atmosphere or aesthetics above all else to stoke our curiosity. Others are unabashedly joyful aberrations, evoking the feverish intensity of a B movie—content with just being offbeat. They revel in schlock for its own sake, not unlike God’s Trigger, a top-down action game that’s closer in spirit to the campiness of the violent House of the Dead than the more thoughtful, neo-noir cool of Hotline Miami.

Mechanically, the game still functions more like Hotline Miami, where most of the action—planning, looking, and slaughtering—is viewed from an overhead perspective. As a fallen Angel and a banished Demon—both of whom go by the amusingly mundane names of Harry and Judy—players have to save the world from certain annihilation at the hands of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War, and Pestilence. True to the threadbare plot of most B movies, Harry and Judy’s grand plan to cancel the apocalypse is brutal and straightforward: Rampage through the highest heavens, the bowels of hell, and everywhere else in between, and pulverize every corrupted being standing in your way. But whereas Hotline Miami sets out to make a statement about violence, God’s Trigger dispenses with such pretenses, wanting above all else for you to savor that endorphin rush that comes from fighting violence with bigger, badder forms of it—a spectacle that’s often capped with the cheesiest of one-liners, like “I never thought I’ll be fighting alongside a demon like her.”

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God’s Trigger can be played as single-player or co-operatively, and if you chose to storm through the campaign by your lonesome, that means having to switch between Harry and Judy at opportune moments. Conversely, the game’s co-op mode not only shows more relish as you exact unholy justice against your enemies, it channels the most cliché of tropes from your average buddy-cop film along the way. For one, Harry and Judy are prone to trading barbed quips like “Am I doing this alone?!” in the midst of near-death scenarios.

The game is exceptionally good at empowering you with the means to enact such violence, and in a satisfying variety of ways. On one side we have Harry the melee warrior, armed with a celestial blade and an aura of righteous anger that grants him the strength to storm through crumbling walls. On the other we have Judy and her infernal chain-whip, which allows her to attack grunts from afar; she can also teleport a fixed distance between rooms that are separated by prison bars, incinerating her opponents when she re-materializes. Between levels, you’re awarded experience points, letting you fine-tune these skills and unlock even more techniques for bludgeoning your way through mobs of foes.

Given its emphasis on teamwork, God’s Trigger is a far more gratifying experience as a co-op shooter. The protagonists’ abilities are highly complementary; one is a close-combat fighter, while the other is a ranged hunter. Beyond that, the puzzles strewn across the levels often require players to coordinate and strategize with one another, such as having Harry and Judy pull two levers at the same time in order to open up a new route through a level. And at more challenging levels, they even have to keep their movements perfectly in sync, so as to avoid triggering deadly traps like spiked floors. Meanwhile, synchronizing Harry and Judy’s kills rewards players with additional experience points and perks, such as a bullet-time effect.

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Coordinating and strategizing with a second player is so rewarding that the single-player feels beside the point, lacking as it does the thrilling unpredictability and momentum that the co-op mode delivers in spades. The solo approach, which requires overthinking one’s moves or taking a stealthy approach, flies in the face of the riotous fun found in the co-op mode.

In the vein of so many B movies that seek to provide the campiest of thrills, God’s Trigger takes delight in its over-the-top violence, cheesy monologues, and nonsensical plot. It’s what makes the game so memorable, even if that means it never defies genre expectations. God’s Trigger is no rousing masterpiece, nor does it want to be. Only time will tell if it will land in the pantheon of B movie-inspired gaming classics. Until then, sit back and enjoy how much fun and violence it lets you extract from obliterating the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

This game was reviewed using a download code provided by fortyseven communications.

Score: 
 Developer: One More Level  Publisher: Techland Publishing  Platform: PC  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Violence, Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Partial Nudity, Strong Language  Buy: Game

Khee Hoon Chan

Khee Hoon Chan is a freelance writer and copywriter from Singapore. She has written for Unwinnable, Paste, Polygon, and other fine publications.

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