The elevator pitch for Skydance’s Behemoth promises you one thing: huge battles against behemoths. Enemies the size of skyscrapers that you have to dodge, climb, and eventually stab in just the right spot to bring down. It’s Shadow of the Colossus except in VR, with you doing the actual climbing motions yourself. It sounds like a perfect fit, and fighting them is as entertaining as you’d expect… except you only get to get to do so a handful of times. The rest of the game has you fighting human enemies, exploring levels, and solving puzzles, which is a bit less exciting.
If you’ve played a combat focused VR game before, you’ll have an idea of what to expect from the person to person combat – scabbards on each hip and shoulder allow you to carry and switch between a variety of weapons ranging from standard swords, axes, shields, and bows through to giant, Cloud Strife-sized swords and yet another sword that can be re-summoned after throwing. Make no mistake, you are a very dangerous person in this game and that’s before you take into account the powers that you’ll quickly acquire, such as super strength that, when activated, lets you pick up whole enemies and throw them around, punch through damaged walls, and more.
Clearly the game gives you a lot of tools and you will use them in conjunction with a parry/riposte system to fight your way through levels in search of the behemoth. There’s more than enemies to contend with though, as there’s also the dreaded stamina bar-based climbing which, provided you glance at what you need to do first and keep the pace up, isn’t really an issue. You’ll also quickly find a wrist mounted grappling hook that allows you to pull, swing, and zip up to things, not to mention pulling enemies towards you during combat. It doesn’t take long before you’re doing typical platformer things like grappling between points without landing. Except in VR!
The only problem is that it’s all a bit too easy. The puzzles in particular are very simplistic and feel especially laborious when you’re the actual person dragging giant blocks around. The combat is a bit easy as well, only really raising its difficulty when you reach a boss, whether that’s a beefed up human or behemoth. It doesn’t bother you too much whilst you’re playing, because the moment-to-moment fighting is so much fun, but after a battle it tends to feel like it was over too quickly. Even the enemies with lengthy health bars are a bit too easy once you’ve got a handle on the parry system. Then it’s just a case of working down their health until their helmet pops off so you can stab them in the face. Lovely.
I do enjoy the staging of things throughout – one battle with an archer boss had arrows hit a save point as you’re using it, with a dramatic pause waiting for you to turn around to continue the encounter. It feels like the kind of melodrama you expect in medieval fantasy. Outside of moments like this the story itself isn’t particularly engrossing, but it’s good enough to keep you going at least and the voice acting sells it well enough.
Now we come to the behemoths. Yep, they’re actually that big and they look even bigger in VR, especially when you’re clinging to their ankles. These go too far the other way in terms of difficulty, and I found that there was a bit of trial and error involved in defeating them – obviously error means death. Sometimes it took a while before I noticed a weak point or climbable part, which makes you feel like an idiot when really, you just couldn’t see it from where you were or it wasn’t shining like usual for some reason. Outside of this, though, they’re thrilling. The build up to the behemoths is good as well – one of my favourite moments comes in the run up to the second behemoth, a large bat like creature. It’s hanging in front of you silhouetted so you don’t notice it in the environment until it unfurls its wings and roars before flying upwards through the cavern you’re entering. It’s just great.
The game runs flawlessly on PSVR 2 and looks good, if not great. It controls well enough most of the time, though there can be a bit of awkwardness around sheathing weapons as is typical in VR. Activating the super strength is a bit inconsistent as well – sometimes I thought I had done it but it hadn’t triggered for some reason and others it wouldn’t register me hitting a wall with it activated, which caused it to run out and forced me to wait for the cooldown. I also found that aiming with a bow would sometimes cause the bow to wiggle slightly with the hand tracking, which isn’t great for aiming really.
