Arms of God (PC) Early Access Preview

To intentionally misquote Black Sabbath: “No more war pigs have the power | Arms of God has struck the hour.” That was honestly the first idea for an opening sentence that popped into my mind, but the more time I spent playing Arms of God, the more I realized that’s actually a very fitting reference. Arms of God is a Vampire Survivors-like title developed and published by Dark Jay Studio. I discovered that Dark Jay Studio is actually just a solo developer, which is one of quite a few reasons why I’m so thoroughly impressed with Arms of God.

Arms of God is additional proof that solo developers can (and frequently do) make excellent games without the need to appease any external publishers. That being said, however, it’s likely for the best that Arms of God will be spending some time in Early Access before launching fully, since it has some hiccups that need to be ironed out. You might even say Arms of God could use some more elbow grease. I’ll get to those issues in due time, though. Let me back up a bit so I can explain in more detail exactly what we’ve got here.

In Arms of God, you play as your choice of a group of Templars who have been chosen to venture out into a demon-infested world and destroy the source of said demonic corruption. You start with only one playable character available, but you’ll unlock the rest as you progress and meet certain requirements. Each playable character has their own strengths and weaknesses you can use to your advantage. These include, for example, the character getting buffs to one type of elemental damage while also having equivalent debuffs to the other types, and buffs to melee damage balanced with debuffs to ranged damage.

You have quite an assortment of starting weapons to choose from, including melee and ranged options that deal one of the three types of elemental damage (holy, fire, and shock). You can acquire additional weapons between levels in each run, and you can have up to five weapons equipped at once. Between stages in a run, you can spend the souls of enemies you’ve slain to acquire new weapons, upgrades to your existing weapons, and passive buffs that affect your global stats. You can also combine two of the same weapon (e.g., two magnums) into a single, more powerful weapon.

If you’re out of slots for new weapons, you can still purchase weapons this way and attach them to your existing weapons. If you want to attach a holy spear to your magnum or an extended barrel to your flame sword, you can freely do so. Don’t ask me how any of the weapon and upgrade combinations in Arms of God work in a practical sense, because I have no earthly idea. All the ways you can combine weapons and upgrades are really funny to me because of things like that, even though I’m sure that’s not the intended reaction.

You can also lock any of the items you can purchase between levels in a run. Once you lock an item, it stays locked (and, thus, remains available) until you either unlock it or buy it, regardless of how far you get in the current run or how many times you re-roll your available options. That’s a fantastic touch that has come in handy for me quite often. That brings me to Arms of God’s (very addictive) core gameplay loop. The story of Arms of God is broken into multiple acts, which are further divided into individual levels (called “Crusades”).

Your character carries a futuristic-looking cross (called “the Crux”) on their back as they travel between levels. At the start of each level, you’ll plant the Crux upright in the ground and prepare to fight off hordes of incoming demons. You’ll see a timer counting down, both at the top of your screen and near the Crux itself. That timer tells you how long (in seconds) the current level will last. That tells you how long you need to survive, as well as how much time you have to scour the area and collect resources for upgrades before the level ends.

When that timer reaches zero, the Crux will emit a huge blast of holy energy that kills all enemies on-screen and absorbs their souls into itself. Since you can collect and spend enemy souls in the shop between levels, that may seem at first like a bad thing, as though the Crux is “stealing” those souls from you. However, once you’ve completed the first story act and unlocked the Cathedral, you’ll learn that it’s actually to your benefit to allow the Crux to collect as many souls in each level as possible. The Crux has its own abilities and benefits.

Between each level, all the souls absorbed by the Crux increase its power level. You’ll get to choose one new effect to give the Crux between each level. Every so often during a level, the Crux will emit a smaller blast of energy, which will also have whatever effects granted to it from the bonuses you chose. These include things like healing and buffing your character, damaging and debuffing enemies, and increasing the range of the Crux so that its effects can be felt from farther away.

You have two main goals in each run: to survive until the final level of the current story act and defeat whatever horrors await you there, and to explore each level for collectibles and interactable objects. These give you resources you can spend at the Cathedral to unlock permanent upgrades that will help you in future runs. There are several parts of the Cathedral that you’ll have to rebuild before you can use them. That grants Arms of God another point in my favor because it brings back pleasant memories of rebuilding and upgrading the Hamlet in Darkest Dungeon.

On that subject, however, there are quite a lot of currencies within Arms of God that are used to unlock permanent upgrades. There are so many currencies that it can be hard to keep track of what’s what and how best to acquire more of each one, aside from just hoping collectible nodes of whatever currency you need happen to appear during your next run. That brings me to my next complaint about Arms of God, namely the Codex you can reference to learn more about all the currencies and different types of enemies you’ve encountered thus far.

The Codex can definitely be helpful, but what I dislike about it is that it only updates in certain, inconsistent circumstances. The Codex will update the information it offers after the first time you kill a “big” enemy, like a Resurrection Spire or a boss, but it doesn’t do the same for most other “smaller” enemies until you’ve killed 500 of them. That strikes me as both strange and unnecessary. Now that I’ve mentioned all my gripes about the core gameplay loop, there’s one more thing I should acknowledge before I get to the technical issues and bugs I’ve encountered.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, Arms of God is full of religious imagery and themes, specifically those of Christianity. That may seem so obvious as to go without saying, especially since that stuff doesn’t bother me personally, but I wanted to clearly mention it because I know it’s likely to be a turn-off for some potential players. Now then, I’ve encountered a handful of bugs and technical issues within Arms of God. The smallest of these was when the words “text box” randomly appeared on-screen during a level. I don’t know what caused that, and it’s only happened once.

When I rebuilt the Gunsmith at the Cathedral, and again when I rebuilt the Shrine, the pop-up that explains what they do stayed on-screen and wouldn’t go away no matter what I pressed on my keyboard or my controller. That was particularly problematic because I could still access all the other menus with those pop-ups in the way, but the pop-ups prevented me from actually seeing what I was doing. In both cases, I had to force-close Arms of God via Alt+F4 to get rid of those windows. I suspect that’s a bug, and hopefully one that can easily be fixed.

When I originally started working on this article, I was disappointed because I was going to have to “be that guy” once again: I noticed some minor mistakes in in-game text within Arms of God. After a prolonged break due to Summer Game Fest, during which the early access launch of Arms of God came to pass, I’m happy to report that a post-launch hotfix fixes that issue.

I know that sounds like a really small, pedantic thing to be impressed about, but it shows me that Dark Jay Studio really does care about polishing and updating Arms of God until it’s in the best shape possible. There’s a lot of planned content within Arms of God that won’t be playable until future updates are released, but I have no problem with that, considering there’s already a staggering amount to play through and unlock. If you enjoy games of this ilk and you aren’t put off by the term “Early Access,” I highly recommend Arms of God.

A PC review copy of Arms of God was provided by Dark Jay Studio for the purposes of this preview.