Skydance’s Behemoth is one of the biggest PSVR2 releases of 2024. Coming from the developers of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners franchise, Skydance is switching out revolvers and walkers for swords and cursed beasts, promising one of the largest scale fantasy outings in the VR medium. However, Behemoth is proof that bigger certainly doesn’t mean better, as this uneven VR experience is plagued with issues down to its very core.
That might seem like we’ve completely written the game off, but that isn’t entirely the case. There are moments across its roughly eight-hour campaign that offer glimpses of the magic Skydance was aspiring towards. The opener of the game genuinely gave us goosebumps as the towering Behemoth heaves itself away off in the distance, with the snow and fog obscuring its view, and rumbling headset haptics really selling that sense of enormity. In many of the Behemoth reveals, you can’t help but look up in awe. It’s moments like this that VR was made for.
However, don’t let the game’s name fool you. Most of your time with Behemoth is actually spent trudging through mundane fantasy backdrops, facing off against regular old bandits. There are actually only three Behemoth boss fights across the whole thing, which certainly came as a bit of a surprise for us.
You play as Wren, a villager on an epic quest to slay the Behemoths and save his family from the curse they spread across the land. In your travels you become acquainted with a wandering warrior and mysterious spirit, both of whom act as avenues for new weapons, upgrades, and abilities.
The basic loop of the game sees you traversing platforming puzzles, often with the help of the grappling hook on your wrist, allowing you to swing around and zip up to high ledges. Puzzles are interspersed with frequent combat encounters and the occasional mini-boss, before culminating in an epic Behemoth fight. Coursing throughout these sections is a rather cookie cutter story about forgotten kingdoms, foul curses, and characters with ulterior motives. None of it really matters, though, when the ‘world’ around you feels so utterly void of life.
While Skydance will sprinkle in some really pretty skyboxes, or the occasional hallways with great lighting, for the most part you’re exploring copy and paste environments. We revisited the intro of The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners during the review period, and the lack of atmosphere in Behemoth compared to the developer’s previous work is really disheartening. There are flashes of true immersion, like when holding a torch up as you crawl through a cave, but those moments are fleeting.
Of course, this isn’t a game about exploration, as a big focus is sword-to-sword combat. This is probably the strongest aspect of the entire game, although we still have plenty of issues with it. The haptics on controllers feel great when you manage to get a perfect parry, and if you really dive into it, there are plenty of cool moments. We loved seeing arrows pierce our held-up shield, or the stunned, blinking eyes of our enemies staring back at us as we rammed a blade through their skull.
Helping things out are the traversal elements allowed by the grappling hook. With it we could zip around the combat arenas, pull enemies off of ledges, catch an arrow mid-air, and even grab an out-of-reach weapon just in the nick of time. Behemoth gives you swords, knives, axes, bows, and shields, but the longer you spend with the game, the more you realise that the axe will get you through almost every encounter. There are even spiked walls to throw enemies into and your strength ability shatters shields, but sort of like when you realise you don’t actually need to dance in Just Dance, you quickly learn how to most effectively counter enemies, and it all becomes a bit rinse and repeat.
There are moments when Skydance tries to mix things up, like a fight in a deadly gas where you need to cover your mouth with one hand, or another where you place your hands over your ears to dampen the sound of enemy shrieks. These moments are few and far between, though, and awkward hand-tracking actually made some of them more of a nuisance than anything.
There are also platforming puzzles, usually involving a box that needs moving, or doors that need to open. They are fairly inoffensive for the most part, and sadly improve just as the game is wrapping up. It can highlight the perks of the physics system as you pull boxes with your grappling rope, but more often than not, these end up feeling like filler.
But let’s get into the selling point of the game: the Behemoth boss battles. Like we mentioned, these are preposterously large scale, and from a purely visual perspective, they can be incredibly immersive. When we first started climbing up the side of our first Behemoth, we were giddy with how cool it all felt. However, like most things in the game, these bosses feel a bit undercooked.
Whether it was shoddy platforming, unclear signposting, or just awkward design, we died multiple times during each of the three Behemoth boss battles, constantly coming to blows with the technology. While from a visual standpoint things look great in VR, everything else about these fights made us terribly aware that we were actually playing a video game with a hunk of plastic strapped to our face. Falling to our death, grapples not latching onto points, or just getting crushed with awkward Behemoth animations — it all feels unpolished.
It’s a shame too, because there are moments in these boss fights that will reel you in, like holding on to a spear on top of a flying dragon-like creature, or scaling a Behemoth’s face as its giant eye stares back at you. The concepts are great, but the execution quite often feels flawed.
Then when it comes to the performance, Behemoth is riddled with bugs, whether it’s walls popping in and out of view, having to reload saves because doors don’t open after defeating enemies, or bosses being completely invisible. Many patches were dropped across our review period (both pre and post launch) but fairly consistent issues remained.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Skydance’s Behemoth feels like it’s still in its beta phase. The enormity of its Behemoths works excellently in VR, but at almost every turn, the game bogs you down with bugs, repetitive gameplay loops, and underdeveloped level design. Sadly, it also lacks the same sense of place that the developer’s previous work has, with its Forsaken Lands feeling painfully dull for the most part. There are moments when the magic shines through, but Behemoth is a massive missed opportunity overall.