God of Riffs by developer Boss Music Games and publisher VYERSOFT Corp.—PC Review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Having just come from WanadevStudio’s Ragnarock that has just launched from its own Early Access I was pretty pumped to keep the heavy metal flowing in a different vein. Trading up my Viking longship and hammers for two battle axes, the battle was on as I dove into Boss Music Games’ God of Riffs while continuously being charged at by both skeletal warriors and skulls with bat wings!
Currently with four stages, two difficulties and some pretty nifty background scenery, there should be a fair amount to look forward to as development continues as what’s already present is rather solid. Short of a few hiccups here and there that are to be expected with something having just hit Early Access, short of one that made me think everything crashed the rest was rather minor as I hacked, slashed and punted the undead away from me.
While limited in experience at this point to Ragnarock and Beat Saber in the realm of VR rhythm titles, I felt like God of Riff either broke or bent a rule to some degree and I really liked it. From what I had noticed is that the general rule of thumb has seen notes, boxes or skeletons coming in on four lanes but the flying skulls seemed to have six as they could come in from angles making you really have to watch your peripherals. It lead to a bit more unpredictability and it made things much more interesting.
What I felt may not have worked entirely is that sometimes the hit boxes, more on the right side than the left, didn’t feel like they would connect when I hit a skeleton even if my axe was in its head as I would not hear the associated sound with a successful hit. It wasn’t bad on easy but on normal that little thing could be costly as you can only miss so many of the undead before calling it game over.
Finally, while the opening riffs may have had a bit of a hiccup, the developers have been responsive on the Steam forums in order to get everything working right. A bit odd was that my Valve Index’s controllers were literally upside down making hitting enemies a bit awkward as I either held the controllers upside down or looked like an anime character with the weapons backwards as I swung from down to up instead of top down. The issue seems to have fixed so some, but after taking version 0.81 out for a spin to see if this was still the case, sadly, my controllers are still upside down so I’ll be checking back in later to see if this has been fixed.
Overall though, Monster Boss Games’ God of Riff has a lot of potential. Currently still very early in the process, if you’re a fan of rhythm simulators and heavy metal it may be worth checking out now if you don’t want to wait for a later update for more content.
Score: N/A for previews
