God of War for PlayStation 2

GORE, KILLING, BRUTALITY! While I don't mind all three in an action game, like anything too much of it does get kind of tiring. God of War is a good example of things that are overdone or too repetitive. Even the game itself is a cross between things that have been done before. The two that come to mind are prince of persia and devil may cry.

In the beginning, the story starts off interesting enough. We get a super buff bad a55 commiting suicide for whatever reason you find out later in the sparse cutscenes in the game. Now, these cut scense are absolutely beautiful. I can't imagine the number of man hours it took to make this game look the way it does and it pushes the PS2 to it's limits yet the game suffers from virtually no slow down and very very VERY rarely does one see a load screen while playing. after playing it for maybe 9 hours, i've seen 3 load screens while playing. Not bad, the game is quite fluid on the surface. There's even an option that softens the image on the screen to get rid of some of the jaggies on Kratos and the world around. What I did notice about the visual of the game was a scanning problem. Sometimes one section of the screen moved faster or slower than the other part by maybe half a milisecond but it is noticeable as Kratos zips across the screen. However aside from tiny details, the visuals look absolutely amazing.

Beneth the surface of the textures and polygons, you have Kratos. An absolute animal when it comes to killing demons and such. But I didn't feel any sympathy or have any attachment to his character. Being an anti-hero of the game, I sort of expected to sympathize with his curse a little more but none of the scenes or narration really showed how his curse phased him. His curse of course was never being able to sleep without having nightmares, but you never see him wake up with a cold sweat. Instead you see him on the bed with two naked women and yelling "ATHENA!" and most if not all the scenes thereafter involve many dead bodies and blood spurting all over the place and push the story just a little. I won't go into the details too much but the scenes do give short glimpses of the events that happened to Kratos that made him the way he was. Inbetween the scenes are gameplay that focus just on killing and puzzle solving. This is where the element of prince of persia comes in. The puzzles aren't really that inspired. The most challenging one I encountered was one that involved turning a large bow around to shoot at a door. I sat there for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to turn the bow around when it was right infront of me. There was a switch that lowers a ladder and turns a gear and the bow must be placed on that. It seemed way to easy at the time and I was not expecting the solution to be so simple. Most of the other puzzles were solved using brain power and aren't dauntingly difficult. Prince of persia's puzzles seemed more action oriented moving from one place to another and were well implimented into the game. But god of war didn't really seem to have puzzles that stood out from what was already done.

To get to the puzzles, however the player must go through hordes of enemies. The battle system is not that unique. The only thing added is a short attack and a strong attack. Kratos can jump and roll around using the X button and the right analogue stick respectively. the circle button is seemingly useless until you beat an enemy long enough for a cursor shows above it's head. If you use it while the cursor is not showing Kratos is just in for a world of hurt. The circle is the grab button. While the enemy doesn't have the cursor above it's head they'll block the grabs and counter and while dazed, other enemies come from behind and chop him. The L1 button is used to block but by the time you're hit once and dazed the multiple hits to follow are pretty much unblockable. The player has to anticipate the attack from the very beginning which seems like a natural thing. However, there are some 2 hit attacks from the enemy that gives like a second for kratos to just raise his blade and block but he can't. There's a enemy that can move underground jump up infront of Kratos, hit him once and 1 second inbetween you'd expect to be able to block but blocking doesn't work and another blade comes crashing down on Kratos' bald head. Pretty much all the enemies in the game are undead and a bag of bones. Yet, when you tear them apart they're spewing blood left and right. This doesn't seem realistic even if it is just a game based on mythology. I mean, the undead creatures look like they've been dead for centuries yet still hold at least 10 litres of blood. That's a little excessive. There's a Monster Graveyard after you beat the game that shows monsters that didn't show up in the final product. I noticed a skeleton that wasn't put into the game. I really wonder why, maybe because the art director couldn't make the skeleton bleed and make the audience believe it was a bag of blood.

Despite the general sequence of battles, which is hack, blood, killing, the game is quite fun in the beginning to control Kratos. But it's fun to control dante too in devil may cry or the prince. There's nothing that spectacular in god of war. Kratos moves around and can't really manipulate the environment or enemies during battle. I loved how you can ride and enemy in devil may cry 3 or run off walls and such in prince and devil may cry. Basically, Kratos is a no BS killing machine. Most of the time it's just button mashing and many of the moves were borrowed from other games. The combos are really easy to do and the moves are easy to perform. The game is easy enough on normal mode that you can perform all the combos or moves and not get killed by a single mistake. While this greatly influences the utilization of Kratos' arsonel of killer moves, there are only a handful of them that are really useful. Even those useful ones can be cancelled by any enemy attack. One of the most notable moves is the helecopter spin that can wrack up 8 hits per enemy per use. so if you have a room with like 5 or 6 enemies surrounding you it's about 50-80 hits depending on how you chain together the combo before the enemies are dead. However, the more enemies, sometimes there are like 10 or 15 enemies you have to kill before you get crushed by a moving wall, the more likely your hits will be interupted. Now the helecopter move hits at like 5 hits per second, yet somehow some enemies can block it half way. Which really doesn't seem fair considering that I can't block any attack that has an interuption. sometimes it's hard to anticipate enemy attacks because they just aren't animated as well as Kratos. After you beat a nice quart of blood out of your enemies a circle cursor apears above their head meaning you can grab them and play a minigame and do some punishing kills. The mini games range from pressing a certain order of buttons or rotating the left analogue stick. This takes from the finishing moves from prince of persia, but this game it really serves no purpose other than getting orbs that you really need. Sometimes killing them with the mini game yields orbs that you wouldn't get from normally killing the enemy like life orbs or magic orbs. It can be really repetitve seeing Kratos doing the same finishing move over and over again. Usually I just kill the enemies normally and use the special finish only if i need life or magic from a certain enemy.

Now, there are absolutely no useable items that can be picked up or bought. If Kratos is trapped in a room with almost no life left there's nothing you can do but hope that enemies drop a green orb to refill life or a blue orb if you need magic. There are chests that contain orbs in most of the enemy filled rooms but it takes forever for him to open it. it takes like 3 seconds to open a lid of a chest but in reality it takes him the same amount of time to lift a gate which is probably 10x heavier than the chest lid. The only items in the game are ones you can pick up to open doors or life increasing items. There are 2 items that upgrade Kratos' health and magic but you can only increase both 3 times. It's not like the increases matter that much since the game is easy and Kratos doesn't lose much life most of the time. The magic upgrades don't really help either since the magic used drains the meter so much.

The magic in the game have nice visuals but eat too much energy to use for them to be useful. Refilling the magic meter takes quite a bit of time if chests containing blue orbs aren't around. Kratos has 4 magic spells to use. One shoots lightining, one is an area spell, one is freezing enemies and one to summon. You can upgrade all of Kratos' spells and his weapons. The only way to get new moves is to upgrade with red orbs that enemies drop. Kratos has a second sword but it's not that useful to use as it's very slow and just isn't that fun to use.

Couple with the brutal nature of Kratos and his weapons are sounds that are earth shattering. The area effect sounds like the world is coming to an end. Each blade slash sounds like a 100lb blade just struck the ground. Every step and every grunt is powerful. The music in the game is absolutely amazing with orchestral instruments. All the movie scenes are backed by the amazing sound. The only gripe i have with the sound is that the enemies don't really have too much sound to them to give them life and personality. The sounds from the enemy are really not that memorable. Infact most of the enemies themselves aren't that memorable. There are almost no boss encounters in the game. i think 4 at most. Quite pathetic even compared to the first devil may cry. Bosses in devil may cry were inspired and took quite a bit of effort to kill and even though they look dated now, they were still memorable in the way they were designed and moved. The one that comes to mind is nightmare, the blob creature. Bosses of this caliber need to be in more games. It really doesn't help God of War to be so linear as well. the game really is from point A to point B with pretty much zero back tracking. This could be a good thing and a bad thing. To me, revisiting some of the areas in this game is very welcome. The main draw of this game is the visual and audio effects and it's the only reason that really kept me playing. It would have been great if this game were made to be like Jak 3 in a huge world but the time constraints would have been too much to make the game.

In the end, this game feels very short. I beat it in a day dying 2 times because of slipping off things. The puzzles are not really great and the action is quite repetitive. I don't think the game warrants going through it another time to unlock all the secrets. I did watch the making of the game though. There was a ton of work put into this title but most of it sort of went in the wrong way. Not really the wrong way but not on the straight path to sucess. It had a few detours from being the best game but not enough to be a truely outstanding game. The funniest thing in the making of, was "Play god of war, you'll get laid" from one of the staff. I've clocked in around 9 hours on my first try. Other games clocked in at similar times the first time but it took many trials and tribulations to extend the time by a significant amount. The learning curve for this game is quite shallow and any novice action gamer will learn the ropes of this game fairly quickly and still make it through quite quickly. I found this game quite average.