God of War

I recently bought a nice big TV to go with my PS3, so it’s about time to start getting some kickass games. The God of War series is one of the biggest titles around for the system, and there’s a new one that just came out a little while ago, although it shall be a while until I get to that one. Instead, I decided to start from the beginning with the new GoW Collection, which is the first two games ported from the PS2 to the PS3.

There haven’t been a lot of improvements from the PS2 versions, at least not that I’m aware of. I heard mention of higher resolution textures and stuff in one of the included docs for the first game, but of course all the 3D models still have the same polygon count. The biggest improvement is the move from standard definition to 720p. My system is 1080p capable though, so I can see a lot of jaggies in 720. It’s okay though.

Anyway on to the game itself. It’s a lot of fun interwoven with a few hair-pullingly frustrating puzzle/timed bits that almost had me walk away from the game a few times. Oddly though, it’s fun enough to bring me back after a couple hours, unlike some other games from which I often take weeks-long vacations. The fun is derived from a lot of button-mashing, bloody combat and pretty cool environments. The aspect of character improvement is always attractive to me, and that's present in the form of health/magic bar increases and unlockable weapons and skills with upgrade capabilities. Kratos is pretty badass at the start of the game, but by the end he’s a freakin’ blood factory. It’s so very satisfying to slam two massive blades on chains onto a cyclops from 20 feet in the air and see him turn into a swirling mass of glowing red sphere thingies.

There are a lot of quick-time events of which I’m not too fond. Also the camera is a total dick. I could very rarely see where I was going in difficult terrain because it would be pointing sideways or something. Some of the puzzles had me dying so many times that the game would offer me easy mode, but of course that has no effect on puzzle difficulty. I did succumb to it eventually though near the end during a fight with alternate-directional moving floors, big-ass grinder things, fire spouts, and about 100,000 harpies throwing fire bombs at me. Combat was quite a bit easier after that.

I’m not really a history/mythology nerd, so I wasn’t all that drawn in by the background, but it was still kinda neat. Kratos’ story is good’n tragic which makes for an intense plot, which is shown in a few quite nice cut scenes of good length and neat art style. I enjoyed it.

Now I have a bunch more extra video things to watch and another game to play.