Let's start with some praise.
The beginning with the hydra was pretty cool, and the way Kratos kills the hydra was totally fucking sweet.
There's some decent platforming, mainly the nervewracking ones like when you're on some narrow beams making your way around spinning blades about two-hundred feet from the ground, or swinging on ropes over a huge chasm.
The graphics are okay. There's some really neat moments, like many FMVs and after you emerge from the sewers it's sunrise on the battlefield with Ares. Some moments looked cool at first then got old fast, like the Challenge of Hades where everything is black and red. Other moments are cliched and ugly - I wouldn't mind deserts in video games so much if the people designing them would stop acting all there is to a desert is dirt and rocks, and maybe the occasional dried out plant. However, the graphics earn so many points with me for having no bloom and colors other than dog shit brown, monkey puke green, and rotten pus gray the game would have to drop a severed head on my lap and call me fat before I seriously started marking them down.
Can't say the same for the soundtrack however, which amounts to ten different ways of playing the same song. Okay, so sometimes you've got vocals that sound like "HE SAID OOPS" and sometimes you have this piercing banging sound and sometimes it's so slow you can just barely recognize the melody, but pick any moment in the game and chances are it's played to some variation of the title screen theme.
And with that, we've started on the trail of shittiness.
The combat in the game seems to be what gets the most praise, but I found it lackluster. For a little while I was whacking and diving, but I soon found most enemies in the game can be beaten by holding Block until they all finish attacking, then knocking them into the air and mashing buttons. And using Poseidon's Rage when things got messy. Minor variations work on many of the remaining enemies, and the cerberi and cyclopses are beaten by hitting them with a weak-weak-strong, then diving away (and in fact, it's possible "juggle" the cerberi with this). Maybe I would have found it more satisfying had I played on Normal instead of Spartan, and reduced the tedium of all this.
The fatalities were neat at first, but after mashing Circle to ram my sword through a minotaur's mouth for the hundredth time the thrill was gone.
I can only think of three real bosses in the game. The hydra was cool, but the other two were lame.
The next one appears about ten hours after the hydra. It's a giant armorclad minotaur that takes, I'd say, half an hour to beat. You run up to a higher part of the arena and hiding in a corner, double-jump when you see it raise its right hand (your left) and give it a weak-weak-strong after every attack. Occasionally it busts a bolt and starts blowing off steam, and after about five of these you have to run across the room and do a control stick spinning Quick Time Event to set it up to run back to the first part of the room and hit it with a flaming log. You have to do all this, I think five times? Four to take its armor off, then once more to kill it? More if you mess up the QTE? Every now and again I'd think I was back in Shadow of the Colossus, but after taking a second look and seeing everything was red instead of brown and the framerate was stable I'd remember where I was.
The final boss would have been substatially improved had they ditched the shit-goggling "defend your family against the onslaught of Kratos clones" segment. After banging my head against this for an hour, I finally quit the game, let the boss' first phase kill me a bunch of times, switched to easy, beat the game, and I regret nothing.
The camera isn't bad, persay, but the number of times I was battling an enemy that was off screen, or got my rhythm screwed up because I moved into an area where the camera jumped somewhere else completely was unnecessary.
The beginning with the hydra was pretty cool, and the way Kratos kills the hydra was totally fucking sweet.
There's some decent platforming, mainly the nervewracking ones like when you're on some narrow beams making your way around spinning blades about two-hundred feet from the ground, or swinging on ropes over a huge chasm.
The graphics are okay. There's some really neat moments, like many FMVs and after you emerge from the sewers it's sunrise on the battlefield with Ares. Some moments looked cool at first then got old fast, like the Challenge of Hades where everything is black and red. Other moments are cliched and ugly - I wouldn't mind deserts in video games so much if the people designing them would stop acting all there is to a desert is dirt and rocks, and maybe the occasional dried out plant. However, the graphics earn so many points with me for having no bloom and colors other than dog shit brown, monkey puke green, and rotten pus gray the game would have to drop a severed head on my lap and call me fat before I seriously started marking them down.
Can't say the same for the soundtrack however, which amounts to ten different ways of playing the same song. Okay, so sometimes you've got vocals that sound like "HE SAID OOPS" and sometimes you have this piercing banging sound and sometimes it's so slow you can just barely recognize the melody, but pick any moment in the game and chances are it's played to some variation of the title screen theme.
And with that, we've started on the trail of shittiness.
The combat in the game seems to be what gets the most praise, but I found it lackluster. For a little while I was whacking and diving, but I soon found most enemies in the game can be beaten by holding Block until they all finish attacking, then knocking them into the air and mashing buttons. And using Poseidon's Rage when things got messy. Minor variations work on many of the remaining enemies, and the cerberi and cyclopses are beaten by hitting them with a weak-weak-strong, then diving away (and in fact, it's possible "juggle" the cerberi with this). Maybe I would have found it more satisfying had I played on Normal instead of Spartan, and reduced the tedium of all this.
The fatalities were neat at first, but after mashing Circle to ram my sword through a minotaur's mouth for the hundredth time the thrill was gone.
I can only think of three real bosses in the game. The hydra was cool, but the other two were lame.
The next one appears about ten hours after the hydra. It's a giant armorclad minotaur that takes, I'd say, half an hour to beat. You run up to a higher part of the arena and hiding in a corner, double-jump when you see it raise its right hand (your left) and give it a weak-weak-strong after every attack. Occasionally it busts a bolt and starts blowing off steam, and after about five of these you have to run across the room and do a control stick spinning Quick Time Event to set it up to run back to the first part of the room and hit it with a flaming log. You have to do all this, I think five times? Four to take its armor off, then once more to kill it? More if you mess up the QTE? Every now and again I'd think I was back in Shadow of the Colossus, but after taking a second look and seeing everything was red instead of brown and the framerate was stable I'd remember where I was.
The final boss would have been substatially improved had they ditched the shit-goggling "defend your family against the onslaught of Kratos clones" segment. After banging my head against this for an hour, I finally quit the game, let the boss' first phase kill me a bunch of times, switched to easy, beat the game, and I regret nothing.
The camera isn't bad, persay, but the number of times I was battling an enemy that was off screen, or got my rhythm screwed up because I moved into an area where the camera jumped somewhere else completely was unnecessary.
