The Angry Hand of God

UPDATE: The Angry Hand of God is no longer available following the great XBLIG purge.

God is a bit of a bastard, is he not? When he’s not demanding you psychologically torture your children in a pre-MTV version of being Punk’d he’s usually causing some natural disaster somewhere while hobos hold up signs with obscure Bible quotes that allegedly called the whole thing.

It’s in that spirit that Alex Kaiser brings us The Angry Hand of God, where you blow up cities with lightning shot from the finger of the all mighty Jehovah. It’s a mix of Rampage with a Rube-Goldberg puzzle. You’re placed in a city with various citizens and buildings, and you must completely destroy all the buildings to advance to the next level, of which I only made it to the fourth (and possibly final one) before I fell into a coma. This is one seriously boring game.

Here God is not an all-powerful being. You have a limited amount of energy from which to zap the cities with. Using the right trigger, you charge up power and release the button when you’re ready to fire. You can kill humans with one quick jolt, while buildings require multiple full-scale blasts to completely level. You can also knock them over by shooting cars and causing them to swerve off the road and into your target building, although this requires a bit of timing. You also have to deal with various lightning rods that will draw your bolts away from their intended targets. In order to take them down, you need to crash a car into them or get splash damage from further away objects.

South Park on a $0.36 budget.

Oh, and you can’t shoot the Pope, because he’s God’s BFF. I’m a Catholic and even I object to this. Why would. God be friends with the Pope? He looks like Palpatine from Star Wars and is an ex-Nazi who doesn’t want word to get out about just how much child fucking went down in the church and, um, actually never mind. Throw in David Spade and those three can have an awesome road trip movie.

Mindless destruction is usually a lot of fun, but here it’s a total snooze. The graphics give no sense of satisfaction and all the sound effects feel phoned in. You’ll start to get bored before you finish the second level and wish you had spent your $1 on some gumballs instead. Ironically The Angry Hand of God could very well prove there is in fact no such thing as God, for if there was he would have surely struck this game down.

The Angry Hand of God was developed by Alex Kaiser

80 Microsoft Points were sent to Hell in the making of this review.