Skydance’s Behemoth Review (PS VR2) – A key rule that has stayed constant in every medium when it comes to action sequences, is to make the opponent and/or the main character very, very, big to up the stakes.
Consider the entire genre of Kaiju films that has found new life in the last few years. Or every single action video game where after fighting a bunch of small guys, you have to fight one or maybe two very big guys, increasing the difficulty and stakes of scenario for the player.
Size does indeed matter when it comes to action in games, movies, TV, books – anything. So it’s easy to understand the appeal of Skydance’s Behemoth, which pits you, the human-sized protagonist against giant, skyscraper-sized monsters.
These fights are spectacles to be sure, and the rest of the game around these set piece moments is meant to continue the thrill-ride of what it would be like to be imbued with the power to take down creatures that big.
Unfortunately that magic doesn’t last, and beyond some surprisingly fun traversal mechanics and plenty of striking visual moments, Skydance’s Behemoth is on the whole a shallow and repetitive experience, even without all the frustrating bugs.
Author’s Note: Shortly after I saw the credits on Skydance’s Behemoth and just ahead of this review’s publication, developer Skydance Games issued a patch for Behemoth making some changes to the combat worth mentioning, such as adding new modes that greatly reduced stamina drain and fixed a number of issues that added to the combat feeling broken, as I describe in this review.
It’s great to see Skydance already working to improve the experience of Behemoth, though this review was written after having experienced the game in the state that it launched, which you’ll come to know about as you read on. So your mileage may vary on the combat in particular compared to what I discuss here, since I can see these changes alleviating a bit of the frustration I had.
But the rest of the review still stands, as Skydance’s Behemoth’s problems go deeper than tuning the stamina bar can fix.
Skydance’s Behemoth Review (PS VR2) – The Bigger They Are
Ever Wanted To Fight A Skyscraper?
There’s a lot to be said for games that really focus on creating a spectacle for players to enjoy. Behemoth definitely does that in a lot of ways but of course the main way is with the behemoths you have to kill.
There’s four in total, each of them giant in their own right though if you were to compare them there’s a giant bat that’s technically the smallest of the group.
It’s intimidating when you first see any of them though, and you have that moment of looking up at something so unimaginably bigger than you are. Particularly when you look up at the very first behemoth you fight, Shacklehide, it’s almost an overwhelming sight.
I say ‘almost’ only because it’s never lost on you that part of the whole point of this game is taking down these giant creatures. So you know there’s a way to do it, you just need to get into the fights to find out the ‘how’.
That’s where things do take a bit of a disappointing turn. The fights boil down to exposing and stabbing certain weak points, not unlike what you’d experience in Shadow of the Colossus. The difference here though is that there’s no real puzzle to solve in how to take these creatures down, or a narrative that puts real meaning behind your reason for doing so.
If the answer isn’t already obvious to you, it’ll be made obvious, mostly with your ghostly companion Silja shouting out what to do. On one hand, I’m not sure I should/could have expected anything else. It would be a major challenge even outside of VR to design a boss fight with something this big and make you feel like you’re actually harming it without having big bright identifiable markers to hit.
On the other, that doesn’t take away the fact that the fights can feel mundane, especially when the only major threat you need to be aware of is getting stomped on – a threat that’s quickly thwarted by making generous use of the dash mechanic.
Two out of the four are much more exciting to experience, mainly due to the traversal mechanics required to complete them and their individual settings, but it’s not exactly a shining report that only half of these fights meant to be the biggest (pun intended) set-pieces are even a little bit worthwhile.
For example, the puzzle to taking down the giants in Shadow of the Colossus is key to what makes those engagements so mesmerizing, along with the fact that you’re a tiny lad with armed just with a magic sword against a giant stone creature and of course the narrative implications. Without the puzzle or strong narrative backing, it’s a spectacle, sure, but it doesn’t satisfy in the same way when the fight is over.
To use a phrase that makes me feel like I’m turning into my Dad every time I say it, Behemoth is “all sizzle and no steak.” The spectacle and scale of the behemoths is impressive and a visual treat – but actually fighting them doesn’t deliver.
Swing And A Miss
Where Skydance’s Behemoth tries to add spectacle and a little more meat to its steak, to extend the metaphor, is the player vs. human combat, where you’re swinging swords bigger than Cloud’s Buster Sword or using one of the mythical weapons ingrained in the lore of the game world for Behemoth.
There’s some spectacle and, actually fun gameplay to be experienced here – it’s just upsetting that you’ve seen all of it after the first few combat encounters.
You can carry up to eight weapons on your person, though three of those slots will be taken up by the only weapons you can upgrade before the end of the game, and in reality they’re pretty much the only weapons you need to carry with you.
Before I get into the weapons though the combat fundamentals are unfortunately just bland. You’ll have to block and parry attacks by properly angling your weapons and swinging into enemy attacks to parry them off. It helps the whole thing feel like you’re actually sword fighting, with the added realism that if you’re quick enough about it, you can grab your enemies and run them through, whether or not they have a full health bar. It also trivializes every fight you get into.
You also get a bow and arrow and can find a healthy supply of daggers to throw into your enemies eyes, and while using all of these weapons can feel fun for a moment or two, the bottom line is that the combat never gets so complex that you’re pushed to really use everything at your disposal.
The onus is always on you to make the combat more interesting, rather than the game introducing new challenges or limiting factors that force you to try new things and to discover/develop new tactics.
A key point to this is a Strength power up you get thanks to your ghostly companion. When activated you can punch someone’s head clean off, or pick them up and toss them into a wall of spikes or throw them off a ledge. It kind of makes you feel like a medieval Superman, though of course the ability only lasts for a few moments before needing to recharge.
There’s also never a reason to use it unless you want to, and when you do use it, the screen goes grey as if to show you that the player character, Wren, is undergoing some sort of mental haze of fury and power. The problem with this is that it’s just more visual noise that actively makes it difficult to see what’s actually happening.
It was so bothersome I ended up never using the ability save for the few times you’re meant to use it to punch through a wall in order to continue traversing the level.
You also have a stamina meter, which depletes as you swing your weapons and perform exerting actions like throwing your weapons, but that has a similar issue to the Strength ability because the edges of your screen will increasingly be encroached on by a sort of light blue, ice-looking effect to show that you’re running out of stamina.
I get it as a way to show the player that you need to find a way to calm things down and as a point of friction meant to make combat more challenging, but the result is, once again, visual noise that crowds your view and doesn’t actually accomplish the latter of those intended outcomes.
Especially because the only challenge that comes from the combat is trying to keep it from being totally broken. The tracking on your movements is not accurate enough that your full swings are followed from beginning to end, so you get plenty of half-swings that don’t accurately hit their mark. This is especially annoying when trying to use an axe to break a shield.
Far too often I would swing my axe thinking it would hit the enemies shield dead-on, only for the game to register it as me hitting their shield with the handle-end of the axe, and doing no damage to the shield.
It was frustrating against regularly shielded enemies, but hit a boiling point towards the end of the game where a human mini-boss that features a big shield you’re meant to break took me far longer than it reasonably should’ve because my swings were not being registered properly.
I could’ve tried swinging slower, sure, but then not only would those swings not register as doing any damage, they’d be far too slow for the speed of the gameplay, and I’d never actually get a proper hit in on an enemy since they’d all block my attacks with ease.
With tracking that doesn’t properly work for a melee combat-focused game and a myriad of bugs I’ve yet to discuss on top of that, the options I felt left with were to either lean into trivializing every encounter or avoid those tactics and spend more time being frustrated by fundamentally broken combat.
Enemies also all use the same set number of attacks, which further plays into the combat being repetitive. Even the few human bosses you face don’t evolve throughout the fight. That shield boss I mentioned? His big attack is that he’ll charge you with his shield, doing crazy damage if you take the hit head on.
Once you break his shield, surely you’d think his move-set would evolve to reflect that his shield is gone, right? Not at all. He charges you with his arm chest high as if he’s still holding the shield.
So on top of the fight being boring since his move-set is practically the same as every other bog-standard enemy you face, this man who’s presumably meant to look intimidating looks silly, and not in a good way.
For how much combat you’ll face in Behemoth, it feels like the whole system was designed in a single meeting and never evolved beyond that.
Grappling Your Way To A Fun Time
The one area of gameplay where I found it to not only be fun but interesting in how it worked, was traversal. Specifically with the grapple hook you acquire early on in the game.
It’s a key component of your fights with the behemoths, and it’s also a key component of traversal through a good chunk of the game, and it’s the most fun I had in my entire playthrough.
I’d never experienced using a grapple hook or anything similar in VR before, so perhaps it was the novelty that made it weigh on me even more, but it was where I found the game to be at its most consistent.
Climbing the behemoths you fight, or as is the case with the bat, staying in the air and not falling to the ground, is really the only aspect of those fights that’s fun to execute.
As with everything in Behemoth though, the good cannot be without a boatload of bad. The grapple hook is a lot of fun when being used for traversal and in the behemoth fights, but you also have to mundanely use it for what felt like an endless drove of box-pushing puzzles.
Far too often you’ll be asked to push a box over a pressure switch to open a door, using your grapple hook in various ways to pull the box and get it to its destination.
Like the incessant amounts of repetitive combat, these box-pushing puzzles are just bloat to extend your playthrough. They don’t actually add to the game, nor are they even a strong implementation of VR environmental design.
Thankfully they’re all short and easy to complete, which means that if you do decide to play Behemoth after reading all of this, you’re one-step closer to being done with this game.
The Harder They Fall
I won’t lie, I’m very disappointed with how Skydance’s Behemoth turned out. I was quite looking forward to this game, the combat looked and sounded like great fun, and the idea of taking down creatures bigger than the biggest skyscrapers in the world in VR was immediately alluring.
Instead what I got was a frustrating time where I spent much of it battling bugs and poor design choices that made getting to the credits feel like a chore more than anything. If I wasn’t reviewing it, I would have stopped long before the end.
Which finally brings me to the game’s story, something I’ve not really mentioned in this review only because there’s very little to say about it. The voice acting was fine enough when the audio wasn’t bugged, since I had more than a few occasions of the lines simply cutting while subtitles still appeared.
But the characters were bland and the plot was predictable without being the least bit enticing, as it was once again another fantasy tale were, surprise surprise, someone got corrupted by a lust for power.
With only three main characters you don’t have to be a narrative genius to sniff out that one of them was lying to you the whole time and would reveal themselves to be the big bad by the end of the game. I won’t spoil it of course but you can likely come to the correct conclusion (as I did) almost immediately after meeting the character in question.
The enumerable amount of geometry bugs, visual bugs with environmental assets popping in and out, combat bugs with swings not registering I experienced – all those things and more can be patched out, and I’ve no reason to believe that Skydance Games won’t be successful in fixing these issues.
But Skydance’s Behemoth’s problems don’t end with a bug fixing patch. They’re rooted far deeper, in a combat system that doesn’t challenge you to evolve your tactics, a repetitive gameplay-loop, box-pushing puzzles that do little more than extend the game’s runtime and a narrative that does nothing new, with characters I could care less about.
The traversal and the visual design are Skydance’s Behemoth’s strongest assets, along with the spectacle of seeing the game’s four behemoths tower over you as you move forward to challenge them.
Unfortunately for Skydance’s Behemoth, size, looks, and a grapple hook, isn’t everything.
Skydance’s Behemoth is now available on PS VR2 and PS5.
Review code generously provided by the publisher.