God Hand

After a couple of decent playing sessions, I’m still in two minds about God Hand. I know that it isn’t a great game by any stretch of the imagination. Its presentation – to use a grocery metaphor – is somewhere between Pam’s and Budget. But there’s something endearing about it, too. And, for all its many faults, I can’t write God Hand off completely.

But hold on: I’ll step backwards a moment, and introduce this romping and clomping, ripping and clipping, no-holds-barred - but no-frills either - beat-‘em-up title.

So… you’re this guy, right? You lost your arm in a fight defending the weak and needy, or some such story, but you got a replacement – the so-called ‘God Hand’ – which is, as you might expect, far better than a real hand (well, arm... I guess ‘God Arm’ just sounded too much like “God-darn”). In fact, it lets you kick some serious arse once in a while – once you’ve charged up a special meter, of course.

Anyway: you, the God Arm / God Hand, and some girl, are travelling around, apparently with the vague intention of defeating a council of demons. There’s the boss guy, who dresses smartly, looks like a vampire, and has a consistent “I’m surrounded by idiots” tone to his voice. Then, there’s the fat one, who smokes cigars, eats people, and calls himself Elvis. The token female demon, as one might expect, is both sadistic and ridiculously dressed (she appears to be wearing a hot pink skeleton of some kind, and then feels the need to put her leg up on the table – because players wouldn’t notice how revealing her outfit was otherwise, I guess; she makes Soul Calibur’s dominatrix Ivy look like she’s in conservative eveningwear). And of course the fourth is essentially you, except evil: not only is he young, brash, and clearly your arch-rival anyway – he also has the Devil Hand (you guessed it: it’s just like the God Hand, but evil).

It’s easy to poke fun. Far, far too easy. God Hand isn’t just a cliché – it’s a ten-foot-high stack of clichés. And your female companion is possible the worst. Her job, as far as I can tell, is to laugh at the main character in the pointless interludes between levels (which feature bad dialogue delivered with remarkable mediocrity), and then have the camera leer at her arse. The objectification of women in this game is seriously off the charts. I mean it’s one thing putting hot girls in there for guys to look at. But when you’re suddenly being forced to look at some digital behind, when it’s taking up half the screen, then things have gone too far.

The trouble is, I guess, that God Hand is trying to compensate for something: the fact that it looks pretty poor. And I’m not even on my usual soap-box about games having good graphics, but not using them well. God Hand doesn’t have good graphics. And it doesn’t make good use of what it does have. The animations are alright, but the character models are straight out of the early days of the PS2. The textures are poorly done, and make it ugly getting too close to any walls. Most embarrassing, though, is being able to see through walls into any rooms that you can enter: it’s confusing, and it makes the game look amateurish and unfinished.

By now you’re probably dead set against buying this game - but it isn’t all bad. In fact, once you get past the cheesy dialogue – okay: the cheesy everything – there’s a lot of fun to be had. While the fights aren’t hugely varied, the fighting system (unlike most enemies) is smart enough to make it fun. In some ways, the game plays more like a fighting title than a true beat-‘em-up. But that doesn’t mean it’s harder to learn. The basics are easy, and they’re enough to see you through more battles. The complicated stuff, however, is in many cases poorly implemented. Buying moves seemed more trouble than it was worth; and I freely admit that I still don’t know what is going on with the levelling up – every now and then I go up to level 2, only to be levelled down again mere moments later.

But you can fight smart, and with skill. Sometimes the camera angles are frustrating, but that’s more than made up for by the amount of stuff you can pick up and throw, or whack people over the head with. Most importantly: combat is fun, and very rewarding.

The bottom-line? God Hand is fun …but that can’t save it from its own all-too-obvious flaws. It’s enjoyable enough, but there are other, prettier, less ridiculously cheesy games out there. Good enough to rent; not good enough to buy.