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My experience began with an avalanche of small bricks raining down in front of me in a snowy mountain landscape. I quickly learned that danger lurked around every corner. I set out knowing what to expect, but I never expected the scale of what awaited me.
Behemoths are exactly what you’d expect from Shadow of the Colossus if you knew even a little about the basics of the game. Climbing an enemy colossus is a uniquely satisfying experience that only such an accomplishment can provide. In my nearly hour-long demo on PSVR 2, I only fought one Behemoth, but… minimum The Behemoth in the game — it was as tall as a five-story building, so I definitely wasn’t expecting it.
The game’s developers are aiming to deliver a satisfying action-adventure game that borrows some key mechanics from the team’s two previous Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners games while still providing a look and feel that’s uniquely its own.
In fact, the game shares some ideas with the two Walking Dead games, like stamina, health, and weapon physics, but being developed in Unreal Engine 5 meant the team had to re-create everything from scratch. This allowed them to rethink how they wanted Behemoth to feel, rather than just feel like another Walking Dead game set in a snowy landscape, and it seems to have delivered.
Action on the front lines
While both The Walking Dead S&S games were survival sandbox titles, Behemoth aims to be a simpler experience. Like the team’s previous games, levels are visited via a home hub, and players can use earned experience points to upgrade weapons via skill trees and craft vital healing items for missions. However, unlike The Walking Dead, players shouldn’t expect dozens of crafting recipes or collectible items.
Rather, crafting is devised as a way to use herbs and other rare small items found along the way, limiting your ability to heal and testing your strategic skills. There are save points along the way in each of the game’s 12 levels. Each level ends with a behemoth to fight, and some of these act as Dark Souls-esque campfire warp points. However, there’s no weapon durability element to it that would mean you’ll break your weapons mid-battle or have to constantly craft new ones.
Instead, the game lets you loot weapons and shields from enemies you kill along the way, and there are plenty of those to find. It doesn’t even have a complex inventory system like TWD S&S has – you can put herbs and other collectibles in a pouch on your back, but you don’t have to reach over your shoulder to check your inventory at any given time.
Rather, a single slot on the front of the belt allows you to grab healing items when needed (assuming you have some in your inventory, of course), and four weapon slots on your body allow you to quickly and easily switch between your favorite weapons.
In actual gameplay, I found it easy to switch between multiple weapon types, even though I had a bow equipped in the left back slot, a hero sword in the right back slot, a shield on the left side of my belt, and an axe on the right.
Each weapon has different specializations that make them useful: axes will slice through wooden shields with ease, while swords are great for stabbing particularly well-protected foes.
The physics-based combat system is great, and similar to games like Asgard’s Wrath 2 and Until You Fall, but I felt like it didn’t give as many visual cues as other more hand-holding and explanatory titles.
Many combat situations involve blocking or parrying attacks, but you can also use various environmental hazards to take down enemies. All of the traps I found are activated by a grappling hook on your left wrist, which is fired by aiming and pressing the trigger.
Once the grappling hook sinks its teeth into a target, it can grab hold of it and pull it towards you, or launch it by tugging it in one direction.
These types of environmental hazards are present throughout the levels, but vary in scope and style: One trap was an old, unkempt tree that you could pull down, and if you activated your superhuman strength (by pressing two specific buttons simultaneously), you could swing the tree in any direction you wanted.
Similarly, a burst of superhuman strength can allow you to throw a weapon or slice an enemy in half in close combat.
The grappling hook also comes in handy for climbing, and like Horizon Call of the Mountain, there’s a lot of climbing to be done in this game. Of course, climbing a living Behemoth is a little different than just rappelling down the side of a mountain, but this is the crux of what makes this game special.
Players play through the eyes of Ren, a deliberately chosen androgynous name that allows each player to choose how they imagine their character to look and sound as they take on the twelve giants (Behemoths) who have brought a terrible curse upon the land.
Surprisingly, it’s not just his spouse, children, or village mates who are cursed – Ren is cursed as well, and is racing against time to rid the land of the Behemoth, as it is believed that defeating it will rid the land of the curse.
Fighting my way through the one level I played (which apparently won’t be in the final game) led me to a fight with the aforementioned giant Behemoth. While I didn’t have to climb this particular Behemoth’s entire mass to kill it, there was a key moment midway through the fight where I was given the opportunity to climb up its legs and inflict lethal damage.
To defeat the Behemoth, it was ultimately necessary to use an environmental hazard to weaken it enough to climb up to its head, from which it could be ripped out of its essence and erased from existence.
When the final game is released, killing Behemoths will boost things like HP and stamina, but there won’t be a particularly annoying level-up system.
Players who want more endless waves of combat can jump into the game’s “Combat Gym” mode, where they can throw waves of enemies at you, making use of each arena’s special traps and weapons to their heart’s content.
Behemoth will launch later this year for Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest 3, PSVR 2 and Steam VR at an as-yet-undisclosed price. The game’s lead developer, Skydance Games, said the team plans to add new content to the Behemoth universe over time, but no specific dates for DLC or anything else have been set at this time.
As it stands, Behemoth is likely to be one of the big VR behemoths releasing later this year, which should give gamers a good excuse to put on their VR headsets more often.
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