God of Weapons (GoW) is an inventory management/bullet heaven/roguelike game that, while streamlining its genres well, still has room for improvement.

GoW is broken into runs; you start a run by picking from one of many characters and classes. You then enter into a dungeon with 20 levels and progress as deeply as you can before either winning, or dying. Each run will net you resources to purchase permanent upgrades for future runs, increasing the likelyhood of success.

The moment to moment gameplay of God of Weapons is to run around an enclosed arena, dodging enemy attacks, while the items in your inventory automatically attack enemies for you. After each round of this you're brought to an inventory screen. There, you spend the experience you earned from killing enemies to increase the size of your inventory, and the gold you gained (also from killing enemies) to purchase more items.

Unfortunately, the inventory management portion of the game is the least fleshed-out of all the systems. It's less management and more fishing for anything good. There isn't much shuffling of the inventory needed at all; those usual moments of tough decisions and trying to find a place to squeeze items don't occur in GoW. Most items are so awful you don't need to think about your choices: anything new and good you've found will definitely replace something old and mostly awful.

And this is where we come to one of the largest issues with the game: while there's a lot of interesting synergy between items and characters/classes, there's not much synergy between items and other items (with a few notable exceptions), which makes all runs play more or less the same. There are also severe balance issues, the most egregious of which is that fast-attacking ranged weapons beat all other damaging items in the game by a full order of magnitude. This means that finding the ranged machine gun means you've found the safest, fastest, most gold-and-experience-granting item in the game. This applies to character, with any build. Not fun or interesting.

Almost all runs will go like this: you go fishing for +experience items (for more inventory space) and +luck items (for a chance at rarer items). Pick anything that synergizes with your character. Then go fishing for fast ranged items. Then aim for one of the two item synergies that exists: stacking movement speed or stacking lifesteal. Of the 18 stats you can find on items in the game, only lifesteal and movement speed have multiple rare items that you can find that make a combo. One or two rare items for each stat would make itemization much more interesting, but they just aren't there. And between lifesteal and movement speed, movement speed wins by a mile. Lifesteal combos into damage and health gain, but movement speed combos into dodge chance, damage, attack speed, luck, and the safety of being able to move quickly out of enemy effects.

This leads to another unfortunate problem: a lot of the meta progression between runs is using the permanent currency you've attained to unlock new items. Unfortunately, most items suck. Bad. So unlocking them adds them to the pool of items you can roll, which means your overall chance to getting something good is reduced.

There's also the 'win more' issue that plagues all roguelikes and bullet heavens: if you manage to get ahead early, you tend to stay ahead (or become overpowered). GoW has this in spades because one of the stats you can aquire is increased enemy numbers. This means that, if you're doing well, you can increase the number of enemies you fight to get even more gold and experience. This forms a feedback loop: doing well makes you do even better. Conversely, there are no catch-up mechanics of any sort, so if you aren't doing well, you'll start to fall behind more and more quickly until the run is lost.

All told, and despite the criticism above, God of Weapons is a good game. It's fun, looks great, and plays smooth, but the longer you play it the more you'll notice that it could be a lot more interesting with very little effort. By the time you're playing through every character and class you'll likely be bored, but it's still worth a look.

An excellent entry in the genre. Fun - most importantly. I've had all the meta bonuses unlocked for a while but continue playing to unlock yet more items or subclasses or whatever just because the game is simply fun to play. Excellent bang for buck.

Just take note that the last update was 6 months ago (as of writing). If you are reading this, check the update history of the game - if it has yet to be updated, you may well be looking at a dead and abandoned game