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Reviews » God of War [PS2]

What is there really left to say about God of War, a game so widely heralded as one of the first game-of-the-year candidates so far of 2005? How about a dissenting opinion?

I'll come right out and say it, I didn't really like the game. I'm also not exactly a connoisseur of games in the action/adventure/3rd-person-platformer/beat-em-up genre, so maybe that's my problem. Maybe I didn't immediately fall in love with the game because I tend to stay away from crappy 3rd-person-platformers the PS2's library is absolutely filled with, and thereby didn't have a long history of slagging through hours upon hours of game play that was even worse than God of War to compare it to. Maybe it's a lot of things, but the bottom line is that the game has fun parts and it has tedious parts, and the tedious far outweighs the fun.

In case you've completely ignored the massive media coverage God of War has gotten since it's release for the PS2 in March, here's the basic idea. It's a 3rd person action adventure platformer set in the confines of ancient Greece, and full to the brim with all the great bits of Greek mythology. If you're not keeping score, "3rd person action adventure platformer" means it's 3rd person and you spend most of your time mashing buttons to kill things in a variety of horrible ways, and the rampant killing is split up by jumping puzzles which range from 'easy' to 'I am [this] close from destroying my controller, marching to California, and burning down SCEA headquarters'.

You play as Kratos, a Spartan commander who escaped execution at the hands of barbarians by appealing to Ares, the titular God of War. He asks to be saved by Ares in exchange for a life carrying out the murderous will of the God of War. That whole 'life of servitude' thing doesn't end up working out for Kratos, as being Ares' right-hand-man means not always getting to choose who gets to die, so prior to the start of the game Kratos has pretty much decided that Ares needs to be stopped, and it's just a matter of figuring out how exactly you go about killing a god.

So that's the story, more or less. Head to Athens, get some super powers, kill a bunch of zombies and minotaurs, take down Ares. I've seen worse, but in my book that doesn't make "passable" into "good". The plot was coherent and well explained [unlike in, say, Pariah. . . but that's another review], but it was also bland, predictable, full of clichés, and woefully linear. Again, I've seen worse, but this was no gem.

The set of areas I really can't find fault in are graphics, sound, and overall presentation. The game looked amazing, sounded wonderful, and everything all just flowed together perfectly, with barely any load times, pointless backtracking or aimless wandering. It was way more than I really expect to see from a PS2 game, but we are at the end of it's life cycle, and companies always seem to churn out something near the very end that makes you think "How the hell did they manage to pull THIS off with THIS hardware? Where was this four years ago?".

Moving on to content. God of War is one of the first games I can think of where I wouldn't question it having an Adults Only ESRB rating. As is, it still just has a Mature rating. When it says Mature, trust me, it MEANS Mature. More nudity, more normal violence, and more absolutely gratuitous gore than I have ever seen in any game ever. And please believe me when I say I've played lots of games. This was to the point that early on I actually felt bad about playing the game. It was just so incredibly over the top. It isn't just "hurr hurr look boobs" it's "nearly every female character in the game is either topless or wearing a top so sheer it's practically air". It's not just "wow I totally killed that guy and there was blood" it's "wonderful, a high-def ultra-quality cut scene of me close up and tearing a rather realistic guy in two. Lengthwise. Spraying blood everywhere". And this isn't Mortal-Kombat-style "just barely above cartoony" violence, it's realistic enough to be disturbing.

I got over it, though. After killing my fifth minotaur by shoving my giant blades through his mouth and out the back of his skull, and after coming to the realization that yes, everyone in this game is apparently going to be topless (except Athena), it all became commonplace. Should this worry me? Probably, but there's no turning back now.

The actual combat in the game is pretty fun. You've got a choice of two main weapons (Dual blades-on-chains that act like flails and a giant broadsword that you get later on) plus four types of magical attacks (radiating area-of-effect, projectile, freeze, and ridiculously overpowered broken move of massive destruction). As you kill stuff and locate chests, you collect MAGIC RED ORBS, which act as both experience and currency. The stuff you buy is in the form of powering up your assorted weapons and spells, each of which has several levels of power. Weapon upgrades make them more powerful and add combos to your set of stuff you can do. Magic upgrades increase effectiveness, add combos, lower cool down, etc.

The combat throughout much of the game can be as repetitive or involved as you want it to be. Sure, if you wanted to you could spam the same three hit combo over and over, or you could actually learn the assorted combos, find out how they can be chained together, and have some fun figuring out what sequences can pull off infinite-infinite combos. Enemies in the game are sadly rather repetitive. There's about seven or eight different main types of critters to beat up in the game, not counting bosses. Of these types, there's several different variations and 'levels' of each one. Generally this alters the overall difficulty of the monster, but if you've been leveling up your weapons, it shouldn't ever be so out of sync that suddenly minotaur v15 is that much worse than minotaur v14.

Combat is, unfortunately, not all that the game is. In between combat you have 'puzzles'. Only a very select few of them are anything I'd actually consider calling a puzzle, since I like to believe that a puzzle is something that makes you think, not spend half an hour jumping around like an idiot while slowly plotting the death of the screaming oracle above you. God of War has two horrible kinds of lesser-puzzles. First is the always lovely jumping puzzle. If you're a platformer, you are apparently required by law to have at least 15 aggregate minutes worth of jumping puzzles. God of War has more than enough of them, including one that really stuck out at me. Now, granted, I'll admit that once I figured out what the hell I was supposed to be doing, it only took a few minutes to finish off the room, but DAMN did I have a hard time getting there.

Let me set the stage. You've spent the past 15 minutes running around in the temple of the oracle, chasing after the oracle who has been carried off by harpies. Eventually you get to a courtyard, where she has become stranded on a rope high above the area. She starts yelling at you. "KRATOS! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" / "KRATOS! ATHENS CRUMBLES WHILE YOU WASTE TIME!" / "KRATOS! YOU MUST SAVE ME!" / "KRATOS! GET ME DOWN!" She yells another one every minute or so, and doesn't stop until you finish the room. In this room there are a few obvious things. There's a little gazebo thing, some caves, two movable pillars, a locked door, a ledge that you apparently need to get to, and an elevator that takes you from the ground level to a ledge on level with the destination.

I spent about half an hour wandering around this room, listening to the oracle complain and whine at me constantly. I tried most of my time using the pillars in sequence trying to hop over to the gazebo. This was annoying because once you made the jump, the camera went into a fixed view that was very inconvenient and impractical, but would make for some nice dramatic screenshots. Because of where the gazebo was in relation to the main ledge, you had to make two completely blind angled jumps, and it just really really sucked. I spent far too much time just running back and forth, adjusting my pillars, trying to jump again, failing, etc. Eventually I realized that I could hop above the door and get on the gazebo without pillars at all, and found that I wasted half an hour of my life attempting a jumping puzzle in the completely wrong way.

The 'puzzles' don't stop there. The developers of God of War seemed to really have a thing for balance puzzles. Balance puzzles are the slightly-less-common relative of jumping puzzles. They're annoying for all the same reasons, but instead of jumping you're on a balance beam of some sort. God of War was absolutely full of these. It seemed like at every turn I had to drop everything and sneak across some rickety rafters to get the powerup and win the game. After several of these, which eventually escalated from "rafters above the current room" to "beam stretching across a BOTTOMLESS PIT OF INSTANT DEATH", I started really thinking about this: "You know, I'm just not really sure how they could make this worse. I'm new to the concept of balance puzzles, and these are unbelievably horrible and frustrating as is, what sick developer would think these aren't hard enough?".

Then I was presented with "Balance Puzzle (With KNIVES)". It was a normal insta-death balance puzzle, but now there were axes on rotating sticks knocking me off, and circular saws at the end. I also spent far too much time thinking about those saws. "Who maintains them? what happens if this colossal death machine wears down or needs oiling? do the harpies have oilcans hidden somewhere? Does this place have a janitor or maintenance crew? I sure know I'd get pissed if I spent the bulk of my life constructing a mad death trap for the glory of the gods and then had it break down after a couple years of service." But anyways, after the knives, I started getting the hang of it. Surely, the only thing that could be worse than Balancing Puzzles with Knives would be if I was suddenly flung into a logrolling contest of some sort.

AND TWO LEVELS LATER I WAS. And the logs had knives TOO! I'd really like to know about the QA process that went on here. Surely someone doing QA informed them "Hey guys, this isn't just annoying, this is the single most unbelievably frustrating and unnecessarily difficult 'puzzle' ever created by man. Shouldn't we reconsider shipping with this crap?" the only remotely logical response I can think of to that is "Well, we spent large sums of money doing the complex MoCap to have Kratos walk along beams, jump on beams, dodge knives on beams, get knocked off beams, climb back up onto beams, and get killed in 87 ways by knives (while trying to balance on beams and/or logs). We can't possibly scrap all this work! It has to stay!". Oh, and then the lowly QA guy cries himself to sleep at night because he knows he failed in stopping their insane plans of releasing balance puzzles onto an unsuspecting gaming public.

I swear I'm not exaggerating about these. Yes, they're possible, but they are - as a whole - the most infuriatingly frustrating videogame element I have ever come across. And as I was playing, I had to ask myself: how can a game full of things this unbelievably annoying be considered for game of the year, let alone be considered for game of the year by a ton of different outlets? Have they all gone insane? I really don't know. I can't speak for them, I can just speak for myself.

The game itself was pretty short and - discounting the balance puzzles - not really that difficult. I worked my way through normal mode in about seven hours, and by the end I was an unstoppable swirling mass of concentrated death. I suggest powering up the 'Souls of Hades' spell as far as possible as soon as you get it, and spamming it constantly. I also suggest powering up the Blade of Artemis as soon as possible, because the maxed version of it is hilariously powerful, though light on combos. If for some reason you enjoy the game, there are three other difficulties, and several bonuses to unlock. I didn't bother with these, as I really couldn't stand to look at the game after I beat it on normal. In fact, the entire last hour of the game I was just hoping it would end soon so I could go back to doing something else that was more interesting, like taking a nap.

In conclusion: Gameplay - good. Real Puzzles - marginal and infrequent. Jumping Puzzles - lame and unnecessary. Balance Puzzles - crimes against humanity. Excessive Gore and Nudity - present and accounted for. If you've got $7 burning a hole in your pocket and nothing to do for the weekend, go rent it. It's a great game for $7 and there's no way it'll last your more than Blockbuster's two weeks. But I'd seriously caution against buying it new.

God of War - PS2

Presentation

Even though the over-the-top and over-abundant gore and nudity in God of War bothers me, I have to admit that it's one of the prettiest PS2 games I've ever come across.

Gameplay

I think I've said enough about how horrible the jumping/balance/climbing puzzles are. Apart from that, the combat is pretty good for a beat-em-up, but after you max out your blade skills there's no point to do anything but spam basic short combos over and over. So, there's depth, but no reason to go in-depth.

Replayability

There's unlockable content in there somewhere, including multiple difficulties, videos and hidden levels, but I can't possibly believe they would be worth putting up with the intense frustration posed by the game's "puzzles".

Value

~15 hours of incredibly frustrating gameplay, and still going for standard retail price after five months. That's too steep for me. Rent it or wait for a greatest-hits price reduction.

Overall

God of War is a short frustrating game. It has it's moments of clarity, but just as soon as you find one you can pretty much expect that you'll be facing some unbelievably evil gamer torture device within a few minutes. The good parts were JUST barely good enough for me to want to finish the game, your milage may vary.