Many Stories Thousands of Years Old, One Game Four Years Old

I have been totally blown away. I have just finished God of War. For those of you who don't know, God of War focuses on the quest of Kratos who is determined to avenge his murdered family by killing Ares, the God of War. The game is set during mythological Greece and pits you against many of the beasts associated with that mythology such as Medusa, the Minotaur and many more.

Kratos is armed with the Blades of Chaos, blades that are attached by chains to Kratos' arms that act as the main weapon and essentially define the combat. The games main selling point is the combat. It's so very visceral and brutal, you really get a good feel of contact with Kratos and the enemies he is eviscerating. The style of the combat is very expressive, there are extremely rare moments where you feel out of control or the fighting controls feel slow. The chain blades give a unique feel to the combat and allow you to both fight enemies at distance and take out hordes in single sweeps.

In addition to the combat controls, the movement feels very smooth making for some great platforming. This is in no small part thanks to the great level design. There are only a handful of areas in which you feel lost as to where to go or what to do next. The game also has a great sense of size and scale. All of the levels feel enormous and as with games such as the more recently released Assassin's Creed, you feel a real achievement when you reach some of the areas that at first seem unreachable. This is an amazing thing to achieve on the PlayStation 2, a piece of hardware that is now 9 years old.

Something of note is the difficulty. The game genuinely hearkens back to the days when games where meant to be frustratingly hard, and just because they required skill, not because they were poorly designed. And the game does require some serious skill. I finished the game on normal, I hate to think what state my controller would have been in, if I had attempted the hard mode.

That brings us to the games visuals. The art direction is amazing and continuous, nothing in the game is truly abstract enough to remove you from the experience. And the experience does look amazing. The PS2 must have been pushed right to it's limits for this game, and it easily looks as though it could be on a current generation machine, rather than last generations hardware. As I've said before, I can't believe I over looked this game until now.

The story is something you'll either love or hate, and this depends on your level of interest in proper old Greek Mythology and the old films that used those stories. Personally I really enjoyed the tale, I feel that it was told well, that the cut scenes maintained the visual continuity and that the dialogue was truly something special and a standard that I wished games today would follow. The ending isn't the biggest surprise, but I won't spoil it for you if, like me, you're late to the party.

I've enjoyed every minute of this game, even when it became frustratingly hard. It's an extremely solid game that makes you feel that you are an immensely powerful mortal, taking on a god. I recommend you get down your local game store and buy it now.

9/10