Real-time strategy fans sadly are in no position to ask for specific takes on the genre, as it’s barely staying alive even with a decent flow of games from both ambitious indies and AA studios, but if you’d been wishing for a new game that carried the torch of Warcraft 3 and Age of Mythology (and isn’t a poor remaster), you might be in luck. Godsworn has just released in early access and fills that slot quite well.
With only two core devs reportedly working on the game, ThunderOak’s mission isn’t simple, but so far, it appears the team is hitting its targets with ease. It’s quite often that we play early access titles full of good intentions that should have stayed longer in the oven before going public, but Godsworn already feels solid enough to buy if you’re into RTS games and enjoyed the little RPG touches that Warcraft 3 added to the genre and the blend of historical elements and mythology that AoM was known for.
Godsworn’s opening cutscene is gorgeous.
Described as “a fantasy RTS game set during the Northern Crusades,” Godsworn’s solid (and fully voiced) campaign (with only five missions released so far) hits the ground running. So much so that newcomers to the genre might find the early beats a bit too dizzying, as the tutorial kind of vanishes once you’re past the first mission. Thankfully, the management and building aspect of the game, while similar to the aforementioned classics, is streamlined in a way I personally didn’t expect.
Long story short: The town center is actually a shrine in which villagers pray and are generated, but both processes are automatic, much like cutting wood, mining minerals, gathering food, and building. You can place buildings and choose how many workers you want on each task, but say goodbye to micromanaging! This translates into far less time spent clicking on villagers and making sure they’re not idle, which can feel a bit daunting and stressful as games’ progress in many traditional RTS, but also means you can’t do advanced strategies with them, and are simply pawns that need to be protected so the faction’s growth flows without hiccups. It’s an interesting approach to a recurring problem of the genre.
It feels familiar, doesn’t it?
Everything surrounding villagers and the more organic growth of towns is perhaps the only part of Godsworn which feels a step ahead of the classics that it pays tribute to. I believe further experimentation would break the spell that makes it a true successor to Blizzard and Ensemble Studios’ early-2000s games.
This means that combat pretty much behaves like it did more than 20 years ago, with heroes (gods in this case) levelling up and learning new active skills as well as adding powers to the pile of tools you can use to declare war on your enemies (or enhance your units). At this point of the early access period, however, action can get confusing often, mainly due to more feedback being needed in certain scenarios. The UI and some visual FX still have a long way to go in order to tighten the connection between what happens on the screen and the player.
This small criticism doesn’t negate the fact that, by and large, Godsworn looks fantastic given the limited manpower behind it. It lands closer to Warcraft 3’s aesthetic, from the unit and building models to how in-game cutscenes are handled, thus making it really charming, but there’s a good amount of Age of Mythology DNA in there too. More importantly, it all holds up when you zoom in and out and doesn’t run like garbage, unlike many titles powered by Unity. Even at this early stage, Godsworn feels like a polished experience – solid original soundtrack included – worth jumping into.
The battles are chaotic but pretty to look at.
As for the amount of content available at the moment, Godsworn already offers five campaign missions, several skirmish maps for traditional custom games, and two factions (Baltic and Order), each slightly modified by the god you select, though changes between the sub-factions aren’t too noticeable at the moment. Moreover, ferocious online matches and co-op play for the campaign are a thing, so there are plenty of ways to enjoy the game put in place already. While you can clearly see the areas that need further development, Godsworn’s early access launch feels generous.
With a price tag just below 30€, this is a game on the right track to become something special by the time it hits 1.0 (roughly in early 2025 if ThunderOak doesn’t lag behind) unless something unexpected alters the creative process. In fact, having played a large number of crushingly disappointing AA titles in the RTS space in recent years, I can confidently say Godsworn made me hopeful again about the genre’s future. That’s no small feat.
