Skydance’s Behemoth review – a VR game with colossal ambitious-Nick Gillett-Entertainment – Metro

Skydance’s Behemoth – the biggests bosses in gaming (Skydance Interactive)

A new VR experience where you fight skyscraper-sized monsters uses the tech to give an incredible sense of size and scale, in this visually impressive action adventure.

There aren’t many games that insert their developer’s name before the title. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six doesn’t count, so the most famous example is probably Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise, and beyond that the various works of American McGee and Hideo Kojima. For whatever reason, it’s also the route media company Skydance have chosen for their latest, Behemoth.

You’ve probably seen the Skydance logo before a number of movies, as they’ve co-produced everything from the Mission: Impossible and Transformers franchises to Alex Garland’s Annihilation. Their video game forays have been relatively limited so far, but they are making Marvel 1943: Rise Of Hydra and a new Star Wars game with Amy Hennig. Although for now their most prominent title is fellow VR game The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

Behemoth certainly has a cracking concept. You’re Wren, a man or woman from a village dying of the Curse, a damning magic that spreads corruption, gradually transforming people into monsters. It has also led to the creation of Behemoths, gargantuan beasts that stalk the Forsaken Lands, spreading terror and chaos. For some reason though, the Curse doesn’t seem to be affecting Wren in quite the same way.

You’re still gradually transforming, but far more slowly than most, and rather than simply weakening you, it instead gives you magical strength you can use for a few seconds before having to wait for a cooldown. In other words, it’s a variety of curse that’s ideally suited to video games, letting you punch though weak walls and hurl enemies around like pathetic rag dolls, but not letting you do those things all the time.

It’s also perfect for Behemoth’s brand of VR physicality. Looking down at your hands, you can see the dark shadow of corruption spreading up your arms, and your interactions with the virtual world are similarly big on participation. To heal, you bring the medicine pouch or herbs up to your mouth, and stowing or drawing your swords or throwing knives means reaching for your waist or behind your shoulders, in gestures that aren’t quite as seamless as Batman’s were in Arkham Shadow but are better than most.

You’ll also need to turn giant keys in locks, re-forge your magic behemoth-slaying sword by hammering the slag off its blade as it sits on an anvil, put your hands over your ears when enemies magically shriek at you, and cover your mouth to protect against toxic mist. Along with climbing hand over hand, the swings and parries of sword fighting, and fending off enemies’ blows with a shield, it really helps draw you into Behemoth’s world.

That sense is at its most impressive when you come across the Behemoths themselves. VR gaming makes it easy to take things more personally than you do watching the action unfold on a screen, and in this case craning your neck to try and see the top of a vast beast, its head shrouded in cloud, is an imposing experience. And that’s before you go toe-to-toe in combat.

Skydance’s Behemoth – you’ll soon get sick of fighting these guys (Skydance Interactive)

Facing off against your first behemoth is intimidating. Its weapon – a massive ball on the end of a chain – is the size of a house, towering above you even when it’s lying on the ground, let alone when it’s being aggressively swung at you. Getting close to its hideous feet, even its toenails are considerably above your head height. It’s a great way of making you feel insignificantly small and grotesquely outmatched.

However, it’s a shame the game feels the need to solve all the problems it poses on your behalf before you’ve even had a chance to consider them, immediately instructing you step-by-step on what to do. Actually performing those actions might take a couple of rounds of practise, but it robs you of the feeling of achievement when you finally turn the creature from mountainous monster to plus-sized cadaver. You’ve mimed out the actions, but someone else was calling the shots.

A bigger problem is that there are too few behemoths to fight. The overwhelming majority of your time is spent making your way to the next big boss by way of legions of human scale cannon fodder. Those can be archers, various denominations of brawler, and the odd mid-level boss, but all must be disposed of using your bow, blades, and occasional bouts of super strength.

Your sword is your main weapon though and VR melee combat suffers from all its usual problems. It’s slow and deliberate, so no matter how wildly you swing your arms in the real world, your in-game sword follows at a sedate pace, breaking the immersion. The tracking isn’t always perfect either, your blade waggling about trying to keep up, leading to an impression of only half controlling the action. You also can’t parry by just holding up your sword, you need to swing towards the incoming strike.

That’s fine, because enemies are generally very kind about telegraphing upcoming attacks, but even with all that assistance, blows frequently seem to clip through your sword, meaning you get hit anyway. You’ll also need to use an axe to hack away at their shields and armour, but only your sword can fend off attacks, so you’ll need to switch in combat, which is just not reliable enough to do under pressure. And don’t get us started on throwing weapons, which proves as awkward as it always seems to in VR games.

The end result is a sense of clumsiness, which given the enormous frequency of those battles, permeates the entire game. We eventually tired of the fighting, switching the difficulty to easy to spent as little time with it as possible. For a combat-based game, that’s not a promising sign. Far more entertaining is the way you traverse the landscapes using your wrist-mounted grapple hook.

It winches you across gaps and up cliffs but it also lets you swing, leaping onto platforms, or catching hold of one of the game’s climbable walls of corruption. Once there, you’ll need to keep an eye on your stamina bar, which erodes as you climb. In combat that means backing off while it recharges. On a long climb it means going as quickly as possible so you can reach terra firm before it runs out.

We’re not fans of snap-turning, but got unusually motion sick with smooth turning, until counter-intuitively discovering that faster turning speeds got rid of the problem. After that, all the winching and swinging worked absolutely fine, with no worries about involuntary regurgitation. That’s useful, because your grapple hook is used constantly, first for traversal, but eventually also for grabbing weapons and consumables, and more amusingly, yanking enemies off ledges.

It’s worth saying that while many VR games tend to be rather blurry, Skydance’s Behemoth rarely does, its glorious vistas of mountains, ruined castles, and majestic forests looking pleasingly clear. The same goes for the scroll that lets you upgrade your powers and fast travel around the map, with your stats and labelled collectibles perfectly readable.

After a slightly delayed launch, Behemoth has had most of its bugs excised, although there were still a few stray bits of audio that seemed to play out of place, and one mid-level boss kept vanishing, only its hat or energy bar remaining – forcing you to target the empty space just below it. Still, most of the game works as intended.

It’s a shame combat isn’t more rewarding, but at least you’ve got the behemoths to look forward to which, without much plot, offer a degree of punctuation to the action. They’re undoubtedly the game’s highlights, and while you don’t get the inspiring melancholy of Shadow Of The Colossus, the fights are at least memorable, each having its own rhythm and techniques.

The game lasts 10 or so hours – a couple more if you can stomach a higher difficulty and yet more time spent hacking your way through tedious, identikit knights and archers – and also sprinkles in some light puzzling, which is slightly undermined by their repetition. It’s a solid use of VR, helping you experience the gross disparities of scale in a far more visceral way than would be possible on a flat screen, but viewed purely as a game it’s not a very big deal.

Formats: PlayStation VR2 (reviewed), Steam VR, and Meta Quest
Price: £34.99
Publisher: Skydance Interactive
Developer: Skydance Interactive
Release Date: 5th December 2024
Age Rating: 18

Skydance’s Behemoth – do look up (Skydance Interactive)

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