Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access Preview: Alpha Of The Pack

God almighty, Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access is a big ask. On a <ahem> professional level, I almost regret taking this on board for a review/preview (it’s Early Access) as it’s a massive game. 

You could say that it’s ambitious, but that’s the word we often associate with a more recent Peter Molyneux title: lots on offer but doesn’t deliver. Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access is nothing like that, and aside from a few niggles, it has so far delivered on what it sets out to do.

From Runwild Entertainment and Versus Evil, this can either be played as a solo effort or online multiplayer. I like to keep to myself, so pleased that a single campaign is jam-packed with content, though playing with others will fast-track your levelling.

Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access Preview

The Elder Gods are dicks. They do as they please and ravaged your people; called names, pulled their hair, destroyed their homes. You, an Alpha, are one of the chosen warriors that are going to turn it around. You’ll seek justice for your people, challenge the Gods, then curl up in a ball and lick your own arse.

Woah – that was a trifle unnecessary, but note that you’re a chimaera of sorts – a wolf in wolf’s clothing, and they do do that. Granted, you’ll have your hands full in this action RPG, but consider it a reward for the hard work. 

After an almighty tutorial, the game really opens up. On the surface, Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access is a third-person action RPG boasting custom load-outs, HUGE enemies, melee or ranged striking and open-world exploration. Delve deeper, and it’s about resource management – rebuilding your base, defences and economy.

After your island is attacked, you steadily rebuild defence towers, mines, wells, farms and Burberry stores. Then, you place some workers, invest in some quality merchandise and fortify the buildings to protect against future attacks. It keeps in line with the base game, so you aren’t shifting about learning convoluted controls.

Test Your Might

Your base is the hub where you can accept challenges to increase XP, earn gold and other materials. There are merchants where you can buy, sell and craft your gear, as well as customise – yes, customise – your Alpha.

Perhaps the key building in Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access, other than the fast travel option, is the Tower of Might. It’s your power source and the more floors you stack and upgrade, the greater your health and magic ability. Naturally, it’s pricey, so it’ll take an age to reach the heavens.

Alpha’s have the ability to wield gauntlets that can be infused with elemental powers – boosting your attacks, shields, and even healing NPCs – in this case, your people; Kindred, whom you can heal and allocate to buildings. But first, you have to rescue them.

It’s not as easy as Metal Gear V: The Phantom Pain, but you extract the Kindred, as well as livestock and the goods you accumulated, all the while fending off attacks from enemies, or the extraction portal shuts down.

Run The Gauntlet

The third-person element reminds me of Spellbreak. Attacks vary from melee and ranged, plus you can combine these when dashing to deal more damage. As an alpha, you get on all fours and dash across each map, at the expense of stamina/mana.

With regards to the load-outs, you can equip a pair of gauntlets that are often elementally infused with additional modifiers. That said, you can swap out the power with an offence, defence, healing or shield configuration – giving almost endless builds for specific situations.

Combat is a little basic, but satisfying nonetheless. Enemies will occasionally ragdoll and there is some notable slowdown in larger skirmishes, but generally easy to get to grips with.

While Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access isn’t Dark Souls, you are incredibly underpowered and will often end up respawning to a designated spot. This can be mildly irritating – especially if you’re on a timed mission and have to dash halfway across a map. Note that with each death, your stamina gauge reduces, making it harder to sprint for longer.

Early Access. Definition?

Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access won me over pretty quickly with the customisation – I’m shallow like that. The character designs are excellent, as are the oversized enemies that look like something out of Starship Troopers. The Kindred are a bit meh, but that’s down to their traits than the actual design.

I have a mid-range PC and seldom run into issues, but while capturing, the game was stuttering quite frequently. Without anything else running, I cut the capture and turned down the visual specs. There wasn’t too much difference in visual quality, Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access is a nice looking game, but frame rates drop in larger battles. On one occasion, it was so bad that I had to alt F4.

Still, it’s Early Access, and sometimes these things happen. Let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t IGN – I don’t get exclusives. If you head over to the Steam page, you’ll see there are already some comments about the game, with a fair amount slating it. 

When inducted into the Kun Anun way of life, you see numerous tutorials, which a few people refer to as cutscenes. After completing a good deal of challenges, you’re told you’re on your own and they disappear. To give the game an hour and dismiss it is incredibly impatient. It’s like playing World of Warcraft for a couple of hours and moaning that you keep getting killed in raids.

Skip To The End

It’s not that Almighty Kill Your Gods Early Access opens up in the endgame, it expands through play. About three or four hours in, I was crafting my gear based on my style of play, building the biggest tower in the land, and had a nice little earner in the way on my Kindred. 15 hours, and I was running loose with the heads of Elder Gods.

The game reminds me a little of Kingdom of Amalur. I love that game, but that got slated by a fair amount in its recent remastering. If that type of game appeals to you, then give this some attention and read some other reviews – notably the Steam comments and weigh it up. I can only give an assessment based on my experience, preference, and patience levels.

The notable flaws were the slowdown, and being too underpowered at the beginning. The developers put this out there to get feedback so they organically build the game for their potential audience. I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: patches and updates will come along, Almighty Kill Your Gods is essentially in development, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s excellent and already putting in the same amount of hours as I did with Nioh 2.

I’ve purposely cut down on my review titles for the past fortnight for a couple of reasons. In this case, it’s allowed me to indulge a bit more in a handful of titles, but Almighty Kill Your Gods is the one I’ve been playing the most.