Skydance's Behemoth brings giant climbable monster fights to VR

Skydance Interactive is best known for The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners, one of the most popular, games on the original PlayStation VR. Combining visceral fights with TWD’s usual dramatic twists, turns and zombies, it felt like a proper VR game.

Behemoth is an action-adventure game that draws on the combat and physics of The Walking Dead games but focuses more on fighting and less on survival. Like Saints and Sinners, there’s still a crafting system, but it’s a lot simpler, reinforcing the action-adventure slant here. I got to play a slice of the game, which combined early tutorial snippets outlining controls and mechanics with more thrilling set pieces and exploration segments – oh, and a battle with the behemoth itself.

Shawn Kittelsen, vice president of Creative, says Behemoth has a more sophisticated combat system. You will have to observe enemies, time your counterattacks and generally think a little more about your strategy instead of just waving your weapons around in virtual space. Doing that will drain your stamina bar, leaving you unable to dodge or block if you’re not careful. While combat feels weighty, you can still flail around with weapons and do damage — limitations are translating the swing of a plastic PSVR controller to a massive four-pound broadsword. This stamina system does help keep that in check, at least a little.

Kittelsen says the game lightly draws inspiration from Dark Souls for battle dynamics. At the same time, the most compelling part — a brief fight with the giant — reminded me of Shadow of the Colossus… from a completely different perspective.

You could split my demo into two halves. The initial chunk of the demo introduces control systems, traversal techniques and how to fight other human foes. Like a lot of VR games, it takes a moment to get up to speed. Fortunately, Skydance equipped my character with a magical sword that I could throw and resummon, Thor hammer-style. That, however, didn’t fix my habit of dropping my shield