Warning: Mature elements are mentioned in this review. While mentioned as nicely as possible, if you are squeamish or faint of heart or easily insulted, please skip to the final paragraph. You have been warned.
Perhaps one of the most "controversial" games of the past three, four years is not actually a game that takes place in Liberty City. Perhaps it is a game about a brutal man, two blades and improperly clothed lady parts. Maybe I am being too indirect; I am describing one of the most overhyped and well-loved games of 2005. That game is God of War.
Let me be upfront about something: I do not like major violence. Sure, it is all fun and games until someone experiences a brutal death. In this game, that is pretty much the main draw: beat the living daylights out of everything that moves; sometimes those deaths are brutal. That is the theme of the game: brutality.
You control Kratos, a brutish man who likes to kill everything that moves. The goal of the game? To kill Ares, the god of war. It feels epic, and everything in the game conspires to make it feel so: grand orchestrations; large, scaling environments; and a plot that tries to feel epic. But after a while, it just felt a little flat to me. Plotwise, there were moments of genius, but there also were moments in which I greatly scratched my head. For example, late in the game Kratos realizes how different he is from 10, 15 years earlier (well before the game takes place). Then, moments later he’s burning a man alive to proceed. While from a gameplay perspective it reinforces the brutality of the character, from a storyline perspective I could not help but think it felt forced; most people who have that type of realization attempt to return to who they were, or at least come to terms with it.
Graphically, the cutscenes are highly realistic while the actual gameplay is several notches lower. This is not to say it is painful to look at; it is amazing that the group got it out of the PlayStation 2. They do a great job of making every place feel unique and "grand" — both in terms of grandeur (like the Grand Canyon) and how good special effects are. Perhaps it is the "pillow" physics that deserve the most credit (blame). I consistently found myself saying whenever a female human or monster was the screen: "In case of an emergency landing in water, the pillows in front of you may be used as a floatation device." Of course, blood flows from every single crevice of flesh possible. And it is taken to the extreme of campy-ness. Some will like it; others will not. I fall into the latter category. If only there was a blocker/sensor option for both blood and nudity, I probably would enjoy the graphics more.
Monsterwise, you will find yourself killing the most "traditional" monsters from Greek mythology: Cyclopes, Cerberus, Medusa and other gorgons, harpies and a host of undead soldiers. Hence, this is a hack-and-slash game, and all the dialogue equals "press the square and triangle buttons." And it is fun. The first time through, that is. Moves alternate between useful and superfluous, and there is the ever-popular circle button that initiates an almost instant kill move. The catch is that you do not get any (if much) experience, and different creatures yield different "orbs" when such a move is initiated.
Weapons do level up through the use of trading in red, blood-like orbs. The highest level for 95 percent of the weapons is level 3 (the only weapon, the Blades of Chaos, can be leveled up to level 5). There’s the ever-popular magic variety of the Head of Medusa for petrifaction, Thunder Bolts (both in arrow and crashing thunderstorm variety) and the souls of the dead. Physically, the only other weapon is a massive broadsword used by Artemis that supposedly cuts through monsters like butter. I found it useless, relying on the Blades of Chaos much more. The Blades tend to be the most useful, along with the Head of Medusa, with the "thunder" magic coming in third.
In an hack-and-slash game, controls either make or break a game. In God of War, it is both. Pressing the square and triangle buttons (respectively) allows Kratos to perform various attacks. They range from useful (traditional attacks, blocking) to useless (the furies circle thingy attack, Icarus’ Ascent, Artemis’ Blade and the final weapon used to battle Ares). Furthermore, since the camera is fixed, the right analog stick is used as a quick dodge move. The problem? Because the camera is fixed, it does not allow Kratos to move the way I want him to. Thus, it makes certain situations much more harrowing than they should be. This also brings the difficulty to light: It ranges from downright easy to nasty (and this is on "normal" difficulty!). The game does have a decent pace of increasing the difficulty, but then it will throw in a new monster, and it goes completely out of whack; save spots are either too rare or overly present, but they are always available before and after a difficult situation. The same is true for those boxes that refill life and magic meters (respectively). There are some puzzles in the game, but they are not that difficult. Hence, they are easily forgettable.
Soundwise, it is satisfying. Music is grand and perfectly fits the mood the developers were aiming for. Furthermore, killing monsters releases a satisfying moan of defeat. And it greatly helps the mood that the voice-acting is done well, and the script is decent enough to carry it. However, once you have heard everything from the cutscenes, they cannot be skipped!
Thus, this brings me to the harrowing decision of whether or not to recommend this game. I have been thinking about it a lot since I beat it. I have arrived at the following conclusion: God of War is overviolent, overhyped and oversexed. It is heterosexist and could be used as a tool to figure out a person’s sexual orientation. (I can easily imagine it being used by psychologists to examine people’s various degrees of arousal — which includes various states of mind, such as being awake or drowsy.) Some have determined that this is game of the year material (back in 2005). I do not. To me, this is God of Bore. Perhaps next summer I’ll replay it on a higher difficulty when I am bored. I highly recommend knowing what you are getting yourself into. Thus, rent it. I strongly suspect this is the reason why I do not like it as well as everyone else: I have played everything that makes up God of War before. But, one does have to give it credit for resurrecting the hack-and-slash genre.
