Gods, Death, & Reapers Preview

If there’s one thing you can say for sure about the games industry in 2025, it’s that extraction shooters are having a moment. Between the blistering success of ARC Raiders, Escape from Tarkov finally hitting 1.0, and the breakout parody game, Escape from Duckov, riding high in the Steam charts, it was only a matter of time before some more novel takes on the formula started to appear.

Wolcen Studio invited us to check out the latest closed alpha of Gods, Death & Reapers (GDR), a game they’re dubbing an “ExtrAction RPG.” An attempt to marry the high-stakes PvPvE loot-grabbing action that’s currently all the rage, with the slightly dustier conventions of the classic ARPG - an isometric camera view, a toolbar stuffed with abilities and cooldowns, maze-like maps, and hordes of enemies flinging themselves at the mercy of your furiously clicking mouse finger. All that good stuff.

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Combat will look and feel familiar to anyone who’s played a PC-style ARPG over the last thirty years or so.

In GDR, you play a Reaper, one of many fallen warriors dragged to the underworld and charged by Death himself with cleaning up the afterlife. This means dropping into maps inspired by mythological realms to smash enemies, clear dungeons, and tackle simple quests, all while grabbing as much loot as possible before attempting to extract with your ill-gotten gains. A failed run means not only losing your loot, but also the gear you have equipped, and it’s this secret sauce that gives extraction games their dramatic tension. Wolcen Studio knows that this hardcore-style experience is not for everyone, though, and has included a selection of game modes catering to different playstyles.

PvP is the spiciest of the three, where survival means overcoming the triple threat of CPU enemies, your own greediness, and the other players roaming the map. Apparently, Death isn’t bothered if, alongside bashing undead skulls, his Reapers occasionally brain the odd colleague, too.

Story mode is gentler, allowing you to explore everything the game has to offer without the threat of dastardly humans or permanent loss of gear. It attempts to simulate the multiplayer experience, too, through CPU-controlled bots. Each character is bound to a single game mode, however, preventing you from taking your turbo-charged Story mode character into PvP, for instance (come on, I had to try). Co-op mode wasn’t available in the alpha, but you will eventually be able to team up against AI enemies with at least one friend, with no PvP element.

Play sessions begin and end at the Sanctuary, your personal hub world, where you return between runs. It’s pretty barren at first, and the focus of the early game is to head out on runs to increase your Reaper Rank and search for resources to spend on opening nodes to expand its functionality. The Sanctuary houses your vault for storing and managing your items and equipment, and building more nodes grants access to shops, quests, and challenges, plus various gear and character customization services.

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Despite his reputation, Death is actually a decent guy

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his support department even sends you daily emails with helpful resources.

Much like the studio’s previous game (Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem), GDR adopts a “You are what you wear” system, where skills and abilities are determined by your weapon choice and loadout, rather than set classes or complex skill trees. As you expand your home base, your tactical options in the field also increase, granting more flexibility over time to work towards your favored builds. Options were fairly limited in the alpha, with four different weapons available and a limited set of skills, but they did offer distinct playstyles, and the developers have a lot more in the works.

The Sanctuary is also where you’ll find the Portal, your gateway to other worlds. We had access to the Norse-inspired Realms of Fate, one of four realms currently in the works for the full release. The menus show what appear to be Egyptian, Mayan, and Greek mythology-inspired locations, so there should be a good variety of places to go and thematically appropriate beasties to bash in the full release.

After spawning into one of its large maps, the action itself is mostly classic ARPG fare, complete with a traditionally grimdark aesthetic. Enemies attack in numbers, in combat with a focus on crowd control, AOE effects, and cooldown management. Attacks and impacts feel perhaps a little weak and weightless at the moment, making battles lack some punch, but it’s nothing a little sound and VFX wizardry can’t fix over time. There’s also a little sprinkle of Dark Souls influence in there (why not, eh?), with major enemies’ and bosses’ attack patterns requiring some good ol’ fashioned dodge-rolling.

Not to let a good viral trend go to waste, GDR has also been infected with a touch of the Vampire Survivors. You begin each run with no skills or abilities, unlocking them over time by earning XP from fallen enemies. A forty-minute timer ticks away in the corner, with enemy spawns increasing in strength and numbers at set intervals. It’s this escalating difficulty, rather than the threat of other players, that most heavily factors in when weighing up a good time to extract. Holding your nerve and sticking around means more XP, stronger skills, and the chance of snagging more resources and better gear. But it also means facing stronger enemies and a tougher, riskier extraction.

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Extraction sequences can be nerve-jangling, especially if another player turns up. A small permanent storage pouch lets you safely stash a few key items that persist, even if you do not.

This all sounds pretty good on paper, right? And it mostly works. The high-stakes extraction gameplay injects each run with a good dose of tension, and the ARPG fundamentals are relatively solid. In that sense, it’s a pretty successful marriage. But for me, the true pleasure of an ARPG, and the holy grail you’re always chasing, is that moment when the build you’ve been theorycrafting (and spent many hours carefully curating) reaches a tipping point where it spills over into god-like power fantasy.

By contrast, the least exciting part is when you’re starting out as a level 1 nobody. And in its current form, this is the experience that greets you every time you start a new run in GDR. It takes a bit too long for things to start heating up, and successive runs can feel a little lifeless and repetitive as a result. It’s a bit of a design conundrum, but one that I am optimistic the team can overcome with future balancing.

If you like the idea of high-stakes extraction gameplay, but shooters aren’t your bag, do check this out when you get the chance. If you’re a Survivors fan and fancy a less passive experience, or an ARPG vet looking for something a bit different, I’d also recommend you keep an eye on it. Gods, Death & Reapers might just scratch an itch you didn’t know you had.