Skydance’s Behemoth is a colossal disappointment

What a pity. After I was able to try out Skydance’s Behemoth at Gamescom 2024, I was extremely excited about the VR title. In the demo, I competed against one of the eponymous Behemoth monsters. The sensationally staged battle against the giant reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus and left a lasting impression.

My frustration is even greater now that I’ve fought my way through the finished game. Behemoth is the biggest disappointment of my gaming year.

What is Behemoth about?

I take on the role of a hunter who’s drawn to the Forsaken Lands. In this desolate world full of thieves and looters, there are a total of four huge creatures that have to be killed. Only if I kill all four magical beasts can I break a curse on my home village.

Developer studio Skydance Games has done a great job of staging the dark fantasy world. The gigantic behemoths in particular are incredibly impressive. I get goosebumps when one of the huge monsters stands in front of me and I have to tilt my head back as far as I can to see more than just its feet. Just epic.

Linear levels and simple puzzles

Unfortunately, encounters with the gigantic creatures are rare. I spend about 90 per cent of my playing time running through linear tube levels where I solve simple puzzles, climb, or kill human enemies.

Despite the impressive graphics, I find the level design boring after just a few hours. There’s hardly anything to discover. The world seems lifeless and not very interactive – very disappointing for a VR game. The best I can do is break a few pots and smash through a few walls every now and then. The simple, repetitive puzzles are also disappointing. I keep having to push boxes onto switches in the floor to open doors. There are more exciting ways to do that.

Every now and then the game forces me to climb or swing through the air with a grappling hook. This generally works OK, but doesn’t feel quite as satisfying as my favourite VR climbing game, Horizon: Call of the Mountain.

This is due to the sometimes-dodgy controls. Sometimes the game doesn’t register my inputs properly and I fall to my death through no fault of my own. It’s also particularly annoying that my weapons keep automatically spawning in my hands for some reason and hindering my climbing. And sometimes, because of the poorly placed inventory, I pull out healing potions instead of interacting with objects in the game environment. This can also happen when I’m climbing, which results in stupid falls. Annoying.

Boring fights against stupid opponents

I defeat enemies in Behemoth with three «legendary» weapons that I unlock as I play and have the option to upgrade. My arsenal includes a magical sword for precise attacks, a powerful axe for breaking through armour, and a bow and arrow for attacking from distance.

The combat system in Behemoth forces me to anticipate enemy attacks and parry them with the correct positioning and angle of my melee weapon. At least in theory – in practice, I can’t get used to the controls, even in combat. I’m never sure why my defence worked or didn’t work, or why my attack was successful or not. The game only gives me inadequate audiovisual feedback, which confuses me.

So, I mostly rely on the brute force of my special power, which I activate for a few seconds with the right trigger. This temporarily enables me to overpower enemies, making it easy to decapitate even the strongest of them.

Losing their heads shouldn’t be too much of a loss for my enemies, because they don’t seem to have much of a brain anyway. The bloodthirsty looters either attack me unilaterally or stand around densely because they can’t find their way to me. Some also get stuck in walls or the ground, so I can take my sword and attack them in peace.

I broke the game

At random intervals, I have to fight against particularly strong human mini bosses. They can usually kill me in one hit without me understanding what just happened. The poorly placed checkpoints cause additional frustration because I can’t restart the fight immediately – I have to go through parts of the current level again.

Luckily, I discover a tactic with the third mini boss that basically «breaks» the frustrating encounters. With a bow and arrow, I can kill the bosses by repeatedly shooting them in the feet. The animation for a hit in the foot takes so long that I can easily reload and fire a new arrow. This strange weakness in the game design enables me to defeat the ultra-difficult mini bosses without moving a single metre.

Fluctuating Behemoth quality

The rare battles against Behemoths leave a much better impression than the human enemies. Two of the four boss battles particularly impressed me. One of the Behemoths is a giant bat. I have to climb around on it while it’s flying and attack its exposed weak spots. It’s an indescribably awesome feeling to fly on the back of a monster bat in VR and look down on the dark fantasy world.

The third Behemoth, Dreddstag, is just as spectacular. I have to use my climbing skills and grappling hook to fight my way up this walking skyscraper while the monster continues to wander through the world. Just wow!

Unfortunately, there’s very little gameplay substance underneath the spectacular staging. The battles against the Behemoths are mostly strictly scripted events. The game requires me to complete certain actions in a specific order in order to kill the huge creatures. Often, these rigid instructions aren’t communicated clearly enough. This leads to some frustrating trial-and-error moments.

Bugs and glitches galore

Unfortunately, the game also disappoints from a technical point of view. In my nine hours of playing time, I encountered countless bugs and glitches. Here are just a few examples:

• A mini boss disappears into the ground
• A mini boss disappears into a wall
• I lose my sword and I’m stuck
• I lose my axe and I’m stuck
• After a Behemoth fight, I glitched through the level and got stuck in an endless loading loop
• In the final boss fight, an event isn’t triggered and I’m stuck

Whenever I encounter these serious errors, I have to quit the game and load an old save. I’m also repeatedly confronted with severe pop-in effects and various sound problems.

The «realistic physics» touted by the developer studio are also very volatile. I notice this, for example, with the boxes used in puzzles. If the boxes get stuck somewhere or bump into something while they’re being moved, I’m sometimes thrown across the room. And boxes that I move with a rope jump around like they’re possessed.

In short, Behemoth’s an unfinished game. The developer studio has already released a Day One patch and promises further improvements in the coming days and weeks. In its current state, the technical problems alone mean I can’t recommend it.

Skydance’s Behemoth is available for PS VR2 (PS5) and PC VR. The game was provided to me by Skydance Games for testing purposes for the PS VR2 (PS5).