Review: Obey Me – PS4

The modern world has become a breeding ground for corruption, sparked from a war among heaven and hell lasting the span of a millennium. The world we once knew is now only a fragment of what it once was. Without giving too much of the premise away, demons may not be the only supernatural forces at work. Assuming the role of Vanessa Held, a low rank soul huntress, and her demonic hellhound companion Monty, they are given the mission from Ammon (who is none other than Satan’s brother himself) of eliminating a traitor amongst their ranks. Will this assignment have a heavenly or a hellish outcome?
From here you’re thrown into the first chapter of the game deemed the Slums. Not too long after you arrive, you’ll engage in your first battle, with the combat system taking a top-down 3D fast-paced brawler approach. Your task is simple: take out your opponents before they reduce your health bar to zero. Vanessa has a variety of attacks within her arsenal to help her slay foes. These include light and heavy attacks and different weapons that become available you progress through the game.

Vanessa also has the power to warp across the environment. Using the warp ability will give you the edge of quickly approaching opponents and avoiding attacks. You can swap weapons during combat as well, so you can change your fighting style depending on your opponent. For example, one demon explodes after being attacked, so the warp ability is really handy to avoid the explosions that affect your health. Every fight feels very fast and packed with action. Obey Me has a fantastic battle music that amplifies the apocalyptic undertone with cyberpunk music alongside biblical elements.
However, Vanessa isn’t the only character that gets up to all the fun and mischief, as Monty also joins you in battle as AI, or in couch-co-op. Every dog has his day. Perhaps, what would be more appropriate to say is that every hellhound has his day! What’s even better is that co-op mode is available after completing the first fight. None of this nonsense of reaching a certain point in the game and then someone can join you in co-op. Monty may not bare his own weapons, but he has a lot of tricks up his paw, including different forms for him to transform into.

Each enemy has spirit energy that becomes bigger with every successful move landed. When an opponent is overloading with spirit energy, you can release a trigger attack that takes advantage of spirit energy collected, releasing spirit dust. Collecting enough spirit energy will allow Vanessa and Monty to fuse with one another where you’re attacks will deal significantly more damage alongside with regenerating your health. If you collect enough spirit energy you can release an explosive soul overload attack onto your foes that will leave your opponent in a vulnerable position.
On occasion, you’ll encounter a boss battle on your crusade. To some degree, it’s the same formula as the majority of the other battles you encounter, with of course the boss having a much bigger health bar. Although, sometimes there will be conditions to fulfil until you can unleash your powerful moves onto your foe, such as striking several panels multiple times. Overall, the combat in the game just feels incredibly fun, it may not be the most elaborate of combat systems, but it’s enough to keep you engaged enough throughout.
After defeating a hoard of enemies, you will be given a combat rating. These are broken down into three categories: efficiency in battle, where you’ll have to keep combat multiplier on-going throughout the battle to maximize the bonus; time passed during the combat and lastly, damage taken during the battle. This is where the warp ability will massively help you out. This is not all. After you’ve completed a chapter, you’ll also have a chapter rating including combat rating, time, and death’s occurred during the chapter. At the beginning of the game, you can pick out one of three difficulty settings: easy, normal and hard. You can only attain the top grade in the hard setting with the attainable SS rank. Even though the game on the surface may appear it has a somewhat simplistic combat system, juggling this element in accumulation will be the key to getting the higher ranks.

In between battles you can explore the environments, attempting to find the right path for completing the level. However, there are plenty of goodies to be found searching the surroundings, including astral shards that restore health, spirit crystals that raise your concentration of spirit energy and soul cores, which are a form of currency used to purchase upgrades and new moves in combat for Vanessa and Monty. There are also collectables to scoop up called Crowley notes. Find these and you can read more extensive lore and background of the game. Don’t worry if you don’t find collectables too interesting; Monty as he often refers to them as “boringggggg”.
However, enemies in the game will not be the only things the player will be fighting against. With massive labyrinth mazes filled with a variety of environmental hazards ranging from lasers, flamethrowers and chainsaws that consume both large amounts of the player’s health and time. At first, these environments are fine to deal with, but after a while, these gimmicks become tiring when encountering them in nearly every chapter of the game.

The game’s humour is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best aspects. The satire and sarcasm felt very reminiscent of Deadpool at times – plenty of ass-kicking, attitude and most important of all, certainly not PG! The voice acting is also spot on and only extends the character’s edgy attitude even further. If that type of humour is your jam, you’ll feel right at home in the company of Vanessa and Monty with their witty one-liners and pessimistic outlook of the world.
On a somewhat irrelevant but interesting note, Obey Me has a coinciding comic books series being released by Dynamite Comics and written by Mario Mentasti, who is the lead writer of the Obey Me video game. Whenever I have a spare few pennies in my pocket I’ll certainly be picking up a few issues of the comics. That’s how much I enjoyed the plot to this game, I cannot get enough of it!
Another drawback is the game is short. Completing the storyline is doable under eight hours, and that includes looking down every possible path. On one hand, this is a strength; especially as the game is orientated as a co-op experience even though you can perfectly experience it solo. It should also be noted that there’s plenty of collectables and high ratings to be obtained. The game is designed to keep you replaying over and over until you can complete each chapter at SS-rank. However, with the plot being the standout feature and main selling point, will you really delve back into the game so quickly again? Unless you’re a completionist trophy hunter, I’m not entirely sure.

Obey Me PS4 Review

• 7.5/10
  Overall - Very Good - 7.5/10

7.5/10

Summary

If you’re looking for a good time, but not a long time then Obey Me is certainly the game for you. The game offers a fun brawler combat system that is bursting with attitude. The satire humour is where the game stands out from the rest – but it’s certainly not PG! However, the environmental gimmicks lurking within the game get repetitive after a while.