God Strike 2 Review

God Strike 2 is a puzzle game in which players take control of an all-powerful god hellbent on striking lowly humans down with an arsenal of lighting bolts. Although the game does a pretty good job of making players feel godlike, the gameplay and certain design choices make it a slightly less than ideal experience.

In God Strike 2, players unleash lighting bolts by swiping down on the screen. After a bolt has been cast, the gods have a recharge time before being allowed to strike again. Throughout the game, players will collect different patterns of lightning bolts, allowing them to cast down forked bolts or other shapes to strike more places at once.

The ultimate goal of any given level is to meet a target number of lighting strikes within specified parameters. If this sounds awfully vague, that's because it is. In some levels, players will have a limited number of strikes to dispatch a certain number of enemies. In others, players will get unlimited lighting bolts but will have to strike each and every enemy on screen within a time limit. This kind of level flexibility within the otherwise basic structure is probably God Strike 2's greatest asset.

The problem with God Strike 2 though, is that it presents players with some overly-tricky lightning bolts and a not so great free-to-play structure, both of which drag down the game considerably. While some new lightning bolts allow players to strike multiple places of the screen at once, others are no different from a straight lightning bolt except for the fact that it isn't straight and instead curves in an awkward way that's tough to judge. This has resulted in a fair number of play sessions ending in failure because I kept getting these curved bolts instead of ones that are actually useful. Pair this with a free-to-play setup that limits how much players can fail over time, and God Strike 2 got pretty old pretty quickly.

Although there are some persistent elements (unlockable gods, boost items, etc) and an alternate survival mode, God Strike 2 just doesn't quite hit the mark. Like one of its devilishly curved lightning bolts, it looks in many ways like it would be a slam dunk puzzle game but unfortunately misses the mark.