BabylonZone

The Kratos saga continues with a decent enough story. Kratos aims to kill Zeus and he does not care about the cost and will stab anyone in the back to complete his vengeance. This is what the story starts out to be, all about vengeance. During the game you will encounter characters and monsters from the past and Kratos will even have some time on his hands to fool around. The story for the most part is killing god after god with not much character development in sight. The last couple of hours Kratos will get little attached to his sidekick, Pandora, and almost at the end he will have to make a choice, let her die and kill Zeus or save her and probably get a whipping he won’t forget. At the end it is revealed that the whole God of War saga was all about “hope” but this final epiphany feels rather forced into the script to give some meaning to the story. The best part of the story is right at the end where Kratos must face his demons in a very interesting style of story telling.
For the God of War fans this story will bring a good finale to the saga while references to the previous games will help fill in some parts of the story. For PS3 newbies who have not played the previous games the story will probably be acceptable if you can excuse the bad voice acting. I can understand if Kratos feels lifeless but there are very little dynamics between the characters.

The basic gameplay is very true to the game series where you use the action buttons to kill hoards of enemies and more than enough timed actions to strike those final blows to them. You will find a handful of weapons to use in your adventure and will even be able to upgrade them as you collect power-up orbs which are used for upgrade currency. The upgrade system is a little lacking in depth but this makes sure you don’t spend minutes upgrading your stuff but instead a mere couple of seconds. There are some very interesting creatures to dispose of in the game but at the end one feel a little cheated by the hype since the variety is just not there. Talking about variety brings us to the environments and again there is only a couple of different settings which you play through twice in the game. This means there is only 5 hours of environment in the game. Your methods of traversing the environments ranges from walking to climbing to grappling and the occasional soaring with your wings. When soaring is not enough you will find some helpful flying creatures which you will be able to grapple to take you where you need to be.
This third and last game of the series is definitely geared for nostalgia and even first time God of War gamers will find pieces of it. With the various mini games present you will enjoy little pieces of Echochrome and 3D fighter games. The best part of the game is the puzzle solving and mini-games. The killing of enemies is not that challenging but the unique finishing moves for most of the creatures actually make up for this.
There are also plenty of irritations gameplay wise in the game. Some cliffs will have invisible walls to make sure you don’t fall off while others don’t, meaning you will fall off more than you would like to. From time to time you would also like to hang off a ledge to try and get to a new section but instead it will not be possible. You immediately get the feeling that the levels were not planned very thoroughly.
To make things worse there are some bad “Spiderman” camera angles from time to time. The camera is AI controlled and a couple of dozen times would I end up around a corner without the camera showing me or I would stand behind an enemy not being able to see what I was doing and what other enemies were attacking me there. But the worst thing of the AI camera is that you cannot inspect the environment as you would like to. With a game so dependent on puzzle solving a free-view camera is a must unless the game can show the whole environment properly while you are traversing it.
The load times for most of the game is fast and not an irritation, but just after the Three Judges was killed load times suddenly was very long for the next 2 scenes and you even heard the music jitter. Since it was only for 2 scenes it is not much of an irritation but with all the rest that went wrong in the game you realize that this game is “all hype and no talent”. For a game over 3 years in the making one would expect much more gaming hours and polish. We have to realise that this was Santa Monica’s first PS3 title.