NakedSushi

Ah God of War, how much I wanted to love you like everyone else seems to! Unfortunately, one of the puzzles in the pissed me off, so I grabbed the disc from my Playstation, sealed it away in my GameFly return envelope, and now I’m writing a review of a game I only played partially.

1 sentence summary:
You play a man named Kratos who is instructed by the other gods of Olympus to kill a bunch of people/demon/monsters and solve a bunch of puzzles to ultimately reach the goal of killing Ares, the God of War.

Graphics:
This game has the best graphics I have ever seen come out of a Playstation 2. The mirror effects, water ripples, shadows, lighting, flames, and blood are incredible to look at. Each combo looks smooth and graceful. If you don’t pay attention to the rolling heads and the blood spraying out of everything, you would think Kratos was dancing in a ballet.

Sound:
The game’s music could have come out of an epic Hollywood blockbuster. Fully orchestrated, and fitting every stage of the game, I would definitely pick up the sound track if I found it somewhere. The God of War performance at the Video Game Music concert I went to at the Hollywood Bowl was one of my favorites of that night. The sound effects for the game are also fairly good, but are overshadowed by the incredible music. The only complaint I would have is that in the battles which involve performing a task for one of the gods, or saving an oracle, the gods and oracles tended to sound like a broken record, saying things like, “Save me!” every five seconds.

Controls:
The controls are easy to get used to and the game makes good use of different combinations of controls to perform different tasks, e.g. L1 + L2 held together to switch between the blades of chaos and the blades of artemis. While the combos look complex at first, they’re easy to pull off through extended button mashing. What I call the “super combos” is a mini-game initatied by pressing the circle button whenever the game tells you to. The mini-game consists of pressing whatever button is flashed on the screen and serves as finishing moves or incredibly damaging moves against the enemy.

Puzzles:
Most of the puzzles are simple and blended seamlessly into the flow of the game. The puzzles make sense and rarely did I get the feeling that the game designers just threw in a puzzle for the sake of having a puzzle in there. Instead of a puzzle which feels artificial, such as “Jump four times, turn counter-clockwise three times, kill five enemies, and then crouch-walk under the tree to open the door”, the game provides more natural puzzles; if there’s a locked door that can’t be open, you have to find something to bust open the door.

Unfortunately, while the puzzles are easy in concept, some of them are a pain in the ass in execution. One puzzle was so frustrating, it made me stop playing the game. I’m talking about that spinning-blades puzzle in that room where there are 2 levers to push, on opposite corners of the room.

Overall:
I do think this is a good game, and it might even be a great game for someone with a little more patience than me, who is willing to get through some of the more excrutiatingly frustrating puzzles. One gripe, I have though, is that the game seems too easy. I was playing on normal mode and didn’t die once until I was at least halfway through the game, and that was only because I missed a jump and fell off a cliff. I would suggest anyone with PS2 to play this game at least once just so they can sit awestruck at what the PS2 can pull off in the visual department still. Also, the sex mini-game is fun for a full 5 minutes.