God’s Trigger Preview
Fans of Hotline: Miami looking to quench their itchy trigger finger, your wait is over. God’s Trigger is Techland’s angels-and-demons-themed take on the top-down shooter, cleverly doubling down on the genre’s chaotic action, combat options, and even player count.
The opening of God’s Trigger puts you knee-deep in its cheesy premise: as the dynamic duo Harry, a fallen angel, and Judy, an exiled demon, you must fight through the forces of heaven in a bid to reach the Stairway to Heaven to stop an impending apocalypse. Guns and superpowers are involved, with plenty of one-liners exchanged. Following this prologue, the story then flashes back to an earlier time on earth with the equally-cheesy mission of eliminating the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Choose Your Approach Wisely
Like Hotline: Miami, the basic combat formula remains the same: both you and the enemies die in one-hit. Clear rooms and chain together kills in succession for a high score. Get nicked and you’ll revert to a previous checkpoint. What sets God’s Trigger apart, however, is the amount of options it offers in how to approach each level.
Harry uses a sword and can quickly dash around an area, whereas the infernal-chain-wielding Judy lashes foes at a distance and has the ability to phase through walls. In single player, Harry and Judy can be swapped between on-the-fly, with some light puzzle-solving taking advantage of this mechanic. Local co-op kicks things up another notch, allowing both characters to wreak carnage on-screen at the same time.
The more you use a character, the more experience you accumulate, unlocking upgrades to their abilities. Some of these modifications are simple, such as extra range to Harry and Judy’s basic attacks. At later levels, things get much more interested as characters gain exclusive skills. For example, Harry can deflect bullets with his sword, and Judy’s chain can pierce through multiple enemies. There are also Each character also possesses special powers. Harry focuses on defense, with powers that can turn him invisible and slow down time. Judy, on the other hand, is more offense-based, able to mind-control enemies and create clones of herself. The catch is that all these skills can’t be equipped at the same time, encouraging you to toy around with various loadouts and develop a preferred playstyle for each character. In the end, I turned Harry into a bit of a jedi assassin, able to knock down enemies with a single force push, then zipping over to finish them off.
The environments also play a surprisingly big role in the gameplay. Most background objects are destructible, and spending some time destroying every single crate and barrel pays off. You might find ammo, exp boosts, or other power-ups. On top of that, you also have to keep an eye out for environmental hazards. At one point, I narrow escaped a raging bar fire, and at another, I got squished by a crumbling water tower.
Hold-on To Your Lunch Buckets
True to all this ridiculousness, God’s Trigger is, thankfully, very self-aware. There’s little time wasted delivering backstory and cinematics. Recognizing what players want and expect, it relentlessly throws battle after battle your way, begging you to soak in its fast-paced action and let loose. In my playthrough, I used sawed-off shotguns, tomahawks, and dynamite to fight through throngs of pistol-toting angels, movie stunt doubles, and possessed bikers. Every section felt progressively crazier than the last in the best way possible. I was disappointed when the end of the preview came, and found myself wanting to replay the available levels over again and test all different builds for Harry and Judy.
With its delightfully weird style and the raw ingredients for a fun co-op experience, God’s Trigger has the potential to be a bar-setter for future top-down shooters. It undoubtedly delivers illogical action in spades, but what truly elevates this title above its contemporaries is its willingness to avoid taking itself seriously. If it isn’t already, God’s Trigger definitely deserves to be on your radar.
*** PC code provided by the publisher ***
