Playstation 2 - God of War

Format
Playstation 2
Publisher
Sony Computer Entertainment
Developer
SCE Studios Santa Monica
Country of origin
US
Genre
3rd person adventure

God of War

By David Rasmussen
22nd May 05

If you thought the Roman Age of video games was underdone, you haven’t seen the Greek Age of video games! If I, personally, thought I had a hard time naming five games set in the Roman Age, I had an even harder time naming five Greek era video games!
The Romans have Rome : Total War, Shadow of Rome and this coming Summer release of Colosseum : Road to Freedom by Toei (they who make Romance of the Three Kingdoms… who ALSO happens to have a new game this Summer with Romance of the Three Kingdoms X… because if you’ve played the last NINE games odds are you’ll play number X). Oh, yeah, first rule of the Roman Age of Video Games is that you do NOT TALK ABOUT KING ARTHUR! Never.
As for the Egyptians? They have the recently released Immortal Cities : Children of the Nile. a RTS (real time strategy) sim game.
Then we have this game, something for Greek fans. Yup, looks like Sony is going to alleviate your need for the Ancient Greeks, their gods and monsters with God of War. Sadly, though, if you were hoping for a Rome : Total War experience with the Greeks you might as well keep waiting… this is more like Shadow of Rome WITHOUT the stupid blonde prettyboy stealth missions! Yah!! Uninterrupted carnage!!

Meet Kratos (if I remember his name right), he’s not having a good day.
See, he used to work for the gods of old like Zeus and so forth, but after this game’s mission he sorta fell out of favor with his old bosses and now he’s doing the suicide leaping thing off of tall cliffs.
Then again maybe he heard former Xena : Warrior Princess star Lucy Lawless has degraded herself to the point of doing starring roles in made for TV nightmares like the retarded “disaster flick” yarn called Locusts, which is about… yes, Locusts that attack major cities.
If I was a Xena fan I’d commit suicide too after hearing how far she’s dropped after leaving Xena!
Well, maybe his decision to become the Black Dahlia of Ancient Greece has more to do with his last mission for the gods than his Xena fanclub membership.

After watching Kratos do the suicidal high dive the game flashes back to three weeks ago and the story about the mission which lead him to doing the suicide leap is laid out before you. You see, old Kratos here used to be a bad dude. Makes the leads of both Grand Theft Auto : Vice City and Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas look like total wimps compared to his bad self! Severely bad dude.
Guy butchered tons of people, and even tore quite a few apart with his bare hands! Yeah, if CJ could do half the things Kratos can in San Andreas you’d have the cops running AWAY from you instead of after you!
Think of this game as the ultimate anti hero since this guy used to NOT be a hero, and sometimes he’s not very heroic. Mostly it has to do with lots of slaughtering of innocents and so forth, accompanied with lots of flashbacks seen throughout the game.

Yeah. His past is not all grapes and satyrs, and it’s that old past of his that haunts him constantly (about 10 years worth of constantly to be precise)…. And for Zeus’s sake that’s such a pain to listen to!
Guy’s a studly cross between that old Valiant Comics character Bloodshot (being he’s pale and got strange body art) and Mr. Universe, he kicks butt hard and fights like a demon, and beds TWO women at a time! What’s he got to complain about! Oh, right, his bloodsoaked past and his formely living wife… so now he just sleeps with any two women at a time to get over his dead wife, right? Eck. Looks like true love’s dead in this game folks! Kratos? Hundreds of characters had the same horrible life, and you don’t hear half of them whine about it. So, guess what, shut up.

But I’m digressing, it looks like the Gods want you… I mean Kratos (you) to do one more job. Do it and you’ll get those pesky memories to go away like a bad Reality TV show…. Yeah, right.
Too bad the job is mission impossible as you set sail for Athens, where Super Sized Un-jolly Red Giant Ares is bending it like Beckham with the armies of the Greeks! Why is he invading Athens? Why is he so insecure that he compensates for it by being super sized angry god of war? I don’t know… maybe it just seems more dramatic that way. Anyway it looks like Kratos’ last job is to kill the big guy, Ares, and he’s got some experience with the guy so he‘s game…. you’ll find out about that other time during the game.

Throughout the game you’ll move from shipboard (on one of those ships that attacked Prince of Persia’s ship at the start of Warrior Within) to Athens, to the desert and a giant temple on top of… whooo!! You gotta see this for yourself! Damn… anyway you’re quest is to give Ares a bad day (which ends in death), and you’ll have a long way to go to do it.

Which brings us to the game. Yes, this game kicks it back majorly like Shadow of Rome, however UNLIKE Shadow of Rome this game doesn’t bog you down with needless “Stealth” missions! You can enjoy the carnage uninterrupted! And yes, it has the moves to boot! 100% action and platforming that… eh… seems to “borrow” abit from Prince of Persia, but if a game has to borrow from another at least it‘s borrowing from a good game in a good way! High balance beam walking, lots of jumping and puzzles to solve, and lots of acrobatic moves during fights! Yes, Kratos is no Prince of Persia (nowhere near as agile) but once he starts swinging his weapons he can really get moving and that’s when the fun starts!

The action is simple, yet engaging and addictive. The creatures are many, and the ways you dispatch them just as numerous! The weapons and magic you can pack (including a decapitated gorgon’s head) can be leveled up as you play, via the use of red orbs that you gather (which you can use to “fuel” each weapon towards a new level up which I‘ll mention later). And, as you upgrade your weapon, you unlock new moves level up of your weapons and magic giving you a ton of different ways to dispatch your enemies which adds to the kickin’ fun of this game!

The levels are massive, and they require abit of thought to circumnavigate, especially since this game uses some really keen puzzles that need to be solved in order to move on. However save points are fairly dispersed about each level, and you shouldn’t have any problems getting lost… I got misdirected a few times but never lost… so you should have no problem progressing through this game!
Heck, even so called impossible areas like the temple in the desert that I keep hinting at (and how cool it looks) can be defeated with a little effort.

A lot of the game seems to take a page from the Resident Evil 4 book, in that some actions require the precise tapping of buttons. However, in this case, instead of action events you’ll use your button mashing on enemies and boss creatures (as in fatality move button mashing)! Since we are talking Ancient Greece then we’re going to have some super sized creatures to fight, and even some not so big but very deadly entites (like the gorgon) that’ll need dispatching. Yeah, ancient games are so much more fun when it allows you to tangle with ancient mythological creatures… except for Rome : Total War but that’s fun because it’s RTS battles are kickin’!

Anyawy button tapping can bring quick “dispatch” scenes to your larger enemies.
For some enemies you’ll have to do such and such a thing to dispatch your so-so opponents (like the minotaur or the gorgon) when your not beating them to death, while for others it’s the only way to finish them off (like the major boss creatures). Button tapping is also the only way to off the boss creatures, especially since some creatures you’ll need to use specific button hits or control movements in order to finish them off (in which one mistake will throw the whole pattern off and it’ll have to be repeated again!)

Powering up is simple. The further you go in the game you’ll uncover gorgon’s eyes and phoenix feathers, both of which will provide power ups to your health and magic meter once you filled up enough of each.
Another way to power up is to power up your weapons via the use of red spheres to charge up each weapon or device in turn. Just about everything can hold red spheres, so break anything and everything to find those sphere since the faster you find them, the faster your weapons power up. And, as I said above, as you power up each weapon they open up new moves and techniques for you to use which makes you even more powerful in turn (which is yet another reason to find as many of those red spheres as you can)!

The one possible downside is that you don’t seem very adept at distinguishing between friend and foe.
Yes, you can wipe out a lot of the bad guys, but you can also waylay a lot of innocent people along the way as well! Unlike other games where you have a “guilt/innocence” thing, where your character’s swings only strikes the guilty while it passes harmlessly through the innocent, it doesn’t work that way here.
I’ve been in the heat of battle a few times and accidentially mauled down innocents as well as guilty while going all out swinging my blades like crazy! People trying to run away from monsters? They’ve been hacked down by me by accident while I tried to save them. Heck, in some levels you are actually “rewarded” when you butcher up innocents! One level you’ll get health boosts for every innocent you off.
In another level you’ll need to “sacrifice” an innocent in order to proceed in the game. Eck…. Not nice!

And yes, this game DOES have some nudity and sexual stuff… but no all out sex, sorry.
In fact you might be disappointed with the game’s small smidgens of sexuality. Really.
It’s got a ton of blood and carnage, but so little sexuality… thought it was “sex & violence”… damn.
You can, however, have “sex” for the red spheres you need to purchase power-ups… at least it‘s not as bad as NARC that uses smack as power-ups. Well, when you reach Athens it seems your guy Kratos had two women in his bed… jump on the bed and press the circle button for a sex mini game. You can play it over and over again and it charges your red sphere meter each time you win. Sorry, you don’t see anything though… sorta like Grand Theft Auto but with none of the cussing and sex talk, though you can watch a vase shake and fall over when… well, you know. And it’s always there again when you initiate the sex game, which means it’s probably a self regenerating vase or something.

As for the story? I don’t have a problem with the story for the most part… except the game, like The Suffering, seems hellbent on making you watch people die. When you are not getting there too late to save the innocent, or accidentially hacking them down during battle, you seem to like to watch… often.
In quite a few cutscenes Kratos just seems content to stand around like a jerk and watch people get mauled down by beasts, shot through the head with arrows, eaten alive by monsters or rend piece by piece by the undead, and so forth when he could have moved in to do some rescuing! Gee, what a swell guy!
I mean what the heck! Kratos could have done something but he just stood there quietly and watched people die right before him. A calculated thing to show you the enemy to come, or a character flaw?
You be the judge.

Overall this is one of those game that you’ll need to turn your “conscience” to the off position in order to make it through this game, especially since sometimes you need to do some unsavory things to move along in this game. Heck, quite a few times there’s unsavory things that need to be done. Me? Heck, I’m surprised Midway didn’t get this game since they seem to be on a blood soaked roll with games like Psi Ops, The Suffering and Roadkill!

This is a good game, better than Shadow of Rome… almost.
I have to say that I did sort of like the carnage better in Shadow of Rome IF IT WAS NOT FOR THE STUPID STEALTH MISSIONS! The one thing that kept me from really enjoying the game was the energy sapping stealth missions that messed up the game’s momentum, and made it stop n’ go more than a smoothly flowing engine of carnage like this game.
One other complaint I have is that there’s not much challenger here. I plowed through most of this game at Normal mode in two days, and that’s way too easy for a game like this! Yeah, while I did get stuck here and there in the game I didn’t stay stucked for long, and worked my way through with some effort.

There are extras, yes there are. There are tons of extras to unlock as you play (once you beat the game, and then more to unlock as you beat the game at certain modes), pity the extras come in a few “bundles” with no real effort needed to unlock them. A majority is unlocked by just beating the game, with a few others needing more effort at harder levels to unlock, but those aren’t enough on their own to merit repeat play.
Still, that doesn’t remove the fun factor of this game so don’t worry too much about that.

There are also two hidden messages, but you might as well forget these since they’re hidden phone numbers. You beat the game at such and such a mode, you get a phone number, call it and get a message telling you how good you were… sigh. What a waste. Could have given some naughty cutscenes for that much effort! If there is any such thing as a useless extra it’s this.
Well, let’s break this down.

God of War Breakdown
What’s Hot?
It’s hot. It’s way better than Shadow of Rome (though the carnage in Shadow of Rome is abit better in one sense if it wasn’t for the damn stealth missions) since it packs on the carnage WITHOUT the needless stealth missions to drag the game’s momentum down! And really, if it wasn’t for the needless (and pointless since the real Octavian did not skulk around Rome after Julius Ceasar’s death) stealth missions then Shadow of Rome could have been just that much better, and a true contendor to challenge God of War!

Also location, location, location means just that much more since you’re hanging in Ancient Greece!
Since you’re in Ancient Greece that means you get to kick it against the creatures of ancient lore like the gorgons, minotaurs, the undead, mini Cerebrus creatures, and so forth. Another plus for the game!
The action is fast and furious, the puzzles are often engaging and interesting, the game is visually beautiful and stunning to look at and the music is great, and unlike Prince of Persia : Warrior Within nobody had the retarded idea to spin a track or two of music from The Scorpion King (starring The Rock) into the game! (You know, the annoying “I… stand alone!!“ song).
Overall this is a solid game that is way fun to play, and one I recommend to you!

And no, I’m not being down on Prince of Persia : Warrior Within! The game is so hard, however, I need to rent it for a SECOND WEEK just to play it for a review! Damn, I like Warrior Within but it’s such a difficult game to play! Guess I should buy it one of these days.

What’s Not?
Three points of note.
1 - It’s kind of easy. I guess if I played Hard mode I would have taken longer but I’ll only do that when I own this game and can devote lots of time to it’s playing. So I guess when you own it you should start at Normal mode… no need to start at Easy, Normal is good enough of a challenge and will only keep you about a week playing before you upgrade to harder levels.
2 - Yes, the carnage is cool, but there’s some merits for the carnage in Shadow of Rome which looks just as beautiful, if not in a few senses better than here in God of War. HOWEVER the stupid stealth missions in Shadow of Rome drags down what could have been a bloody good time to a split between the excellent and the dreadfully boring as you bounce from full out carnage to full out boredom from the stealths!
So in a sense this game could have came up a little short if Shadow of Rome wasn’t so bad in that sense.
3 - The game warns of nudity and sexual themes yet there’s very little of that. Nuff said.

Moments to Remember?
It has it’s moments. Not the warm and cuddly moments, but I mean the visually stunning grand epic visuals moments that can be both bloody, thought provoking, and just plain mind boggling to look at! And the entire game just looks beautiful, from the character animation (except for a few here and there), to the stunning backgrounds that just looks damn good, to the music and the gameplay itself! It’s all good!
There’s the stunning visual of when you see Ares for the first time, which is just cool, but the best visual is when you go for the weapon you need to vanquish Ares.

At one point of the game you’ll travel to secure the weapon you need to beat Ares, and that weapon is being held in this huge temple… thing is, the temple’s “location” is visually grand to look at! I mean you have to see this for yourself, it’s just… eck… you have to look at it! Damn!
And that’s just one of many visually stunning things in this game, in both the cut scenes and actual gameplay… heck, this game is just visual eyecandy even at it’s bloodiest, and that’s good.

What to Ignore?
Hmmm… ah… ignore me. I’m just frustrated, that’s all. Yeah, I went on abit about the whole lack of sex in the game, sorry. Anyway at least the action is solid and packed to the gills with excitement, so there’s that. And, yeah, that’s enough for this game. Play it for the pure carnage and the excellent gameplay, nuff said.
And unlike Prince of Persia : Warrior Within it’s not hard to play, which that game is!
I still like Prince of Persia : Warrior Within, but I just wish the game wasn’t so difficult (even at the Easy difficulty setting)!

Overall?
It’s good. It’s just plain good. Beating out Shadow of Rome as the best game of it’s period, I can’t wait to see what other game in the near future might come out that’ll top this game! Should be interesting to see if anyone can come out with a better Grecian/Roman monster trap that’ll beat this game… except maybe a possible God of War II which the extras seem to hint at.

Yes, despite the fact it seems the story isn’t going to end well one of the extras hints at a God of War II.
Whether or not they make God of War II, however, remains to be seen.
If they do release it I’ll be sure to review it, promise.

-- David Rasmussen 22nd May 05

Playstation 2 God of War Images