10 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Phenomenal game, very addictive, easy to start
Date of Review: Jan 13, 2006
The Bottom Line: Excellent game, go play this at least once.
This game is incredibly beautiful, from the environments to the animations to the audio, the designers really deserve credit on this one.
I play a lot of games but none of them compares in finished quality to God of War.
I've played through the entire game on both the easy and normal modes and be prepared for a great adventure and lots of great scenery.
The actual plot of the game is pretty short; there are only a few stages, but the voice acting is done very well and the actual 'getting there' is the fun. There is a huge variety of enemies, many of which have special finishing move mini-games you can complete.
For example, one larger creature can have its eyes plucked out, gorgons can have their heads twisted off and minotaurs can be laid out on their backs and stabbed to death.
Sounds vicious? It is. This game is rated M for mature for a reason -- the hero of the game is chained to the blades of chaos and he does some serious damage with them.
Special effects in the game are almost movie-quality, cut-scenes blend perfectly into game play and there are no noticeable load times at any point in the game.
You will take on the roll of Kratos, whose life story will be slowly revealed in cut-scenes as you travel through several major scenarios including underwater, demolished cities, sewers, Hades itself and gorgeous temples. The gods will appear to you at various stages of the game to give you new special powers to assist you in the quest they've assigned you.
The game is a third-person action fighting and puzzle game. There are several parts of the game that will make you scratch your head for a while to figure out what you're expected to do next, and scenes where dozens of enemies will simultaneously swarm you, not waiting for you to get your bearings like some games.
At the easiest difficulty, enemies are hardly an issue, but the puzzles will be just as difficult. At the medium and hard difficulties, enemies are both better fighters and harder to kill.
There are no manual camera controls or overrides; each scene is obviously selected very meticulously to both make best use of the PS2's graphics ability and also to awe the player or draw your attention to where you need to go next.
This is not an easy game, but very easy to get into and hard to put down.
