GODBREAKERS Review

Great feel, short legs

GODBREAKERS wants to be spoken about in the same breath as Risk of Rain 2 and Hades, and for the first hour or two of any given session, it earns the comparison. Developed by To The Sky and published by Thunderful Publishing, this 1-4 player co-op action roguelite released on Steam on 23 October 2025 for NZ$28.99, following a Steam Next Fest demo two weeks earlier that gave a meaningful chunk of its eventual review base a genuine, informed preview before launch. The pitch: play as a being summoned by the mysterious Coven to stop a rampaging AI called the Monad from destroying the sun, fighting through the Monad's Hylerian forces across a handful of alien worlds, all while wielding a signature mechanic -- the Godbreak -- that lets you temporarily steal and unleash an enemy's own ability against them.

The combat itself is the one thing almost nobody in GODBREAKERS' review section disputes. Reviewers across the spectrum, positive and negative alike, describe dash-cancelling, fluid combo chains, and a satisfying weight to hits that puts the game in company with genre benchmarks like Dante's Inferno or God of War rather than the more floaty end of the roguelite pack. Playable classes such as the slow, heavy-hitting Pillar, the range-focused Reaper, and the high-mobility Duelist each meaningfully change how a fight is approached rather than being cosmetic reskins of the same moveset, and the Godbreak mechanic gives fights a layer of improvisation that several reviewers called the game's most memorable idea -- stealing a boss's own devastating attack and turning it back on their remaining health bar is exactly the kind of power-fantasy moment the genre is built to deliver.

Where the reviews turn sharply is everything built around that combat core. The single most repeated complaint, appearing independently across dozens of both positive and negative reviews, is that there simply isn't much game here. Runs last roughly 40 minutes and draw from just three of five total worlds, none of which are procedurally generated or meaningfully varied between attempts -- meaning a fourth or fifth run starts to feel, in one reviewer's words, like "the same worlds, the same enemies." Multiple reviewers reported reaching what felt like the content ceiling within two to ten hours, a startling number for a NZ$28.99-40 premium release, and more than one independently reached for the same comparison: this plays and feels like an early access title that shipped at a 1.0 price. That's a serious, specific, and recurring criticism rather than generic post-launch grumbling, and it's corroborated by the developer's own patch history, which shows meaningful content additions (new Tangles, a champion, cosmetics) arriving in dribs and drabs after launch rather than existing at release.

The meta-progression system draws the most consistently frustrated language in the negative reviews. Account-wide upgrades, meant to give returning players a sense of long-term growth between runs, are repeatedly described as amounting to fractional percentage boosts -- "+1% damage, maybe 2% if you're lucky" as one reviewer put it -- that don't meaningfully alter how a build plays even after a serious time investment. Reviewers who enjoyed dozens of hours and even one who completed every achievement in the game both arrived at similar conclusions from opposite directions: the loop is fun in isolated moments, but nothing about repeated play meaningfully deepens or changes it, which is an unusual and specific failure mode for a genre whose entire appeal usually rests on exactly that kind of escalating mastery.

Co-op holds up reasonably well as the game's other major selling point, with multiple reviewers recommending it specifically as a "buy it with a friend on sale" experience rather than a solo purchase, though a few flagged body-blocking issues that can interrupt animation-cancelling in group play, along with the absence of proper matchmaking tools for finding co-op partners. On the technical side, the game reportedly runs well even on older hardware, though a handful of reviewers -- both positive and negative -- independently reported a specific visual bug where certain boss wave attacks become invisible, particularly in co-op or at lower graphics settings, which is a serious fairness problem in a game built around reading and dodging telegraphed attacks.

To The Sky's post-launch support record looks genuinely active on paper: patch 1.1 and 1.2 in the weeks after launch, a free Winter Update with a themed community event in December 2025, and a further Update 2.1 in January 2026. That's a more committed cadence than plenty of larger studios manage. The trouble, based on the review sample, is that those updates mostly tweaked difficulty and added small increments rather than addressing the two core complaints -- world count and meta-progression depth -- that dominate the negative reviews throughout that same period. Notably, the news feed goes silent after that January 2026 update, and one recent reviewer, writing in August 2026, claims the developer has since dissolved entirely. This site has no independent way to confirm that claim, and it should be read as a single unverified report rather than a settled fact, but it would explain both the abrupt stop in patch notes and the sense several late reviewers describe of picking up a game whose development window has quietly closed.

Verdict

GODBREAKERS is a case of a developer nailing the hardest part of an action roguelite -- combat that feels genuinely great to play, moment to moment -- while badly underbuilding everything meant to give that combat long-term weight. Five non-procedural worlds, runs that most reviewers say they've exhausted within half a day, and meta-progression upgrades reviewers repeatedly describe as too small to matter add up to a game whose own audience keeps landing on the same verdict: fun with a friend, worth a look on a steep discount, hard to justify at the asking price it launched with.