Gods of Wars

While Devil May Cry showed a great example of how 3d Castlevania could look, it wasn't until God of War came out that we saw how amazing it could have played.

This game is the perfect example of limiting things in order to make everything sweet. Only two weapons, both very different and usable in different situations. Sure the Chaos Blades are way better than the sword because they are the coolest action weapon ever given to any character in a 3d game, but the sword was still good times.

There's only three bosses, but each fight is very memorable and fun (except for the last last Ares fight, but whatev. Small potatoes for such a perfect game)

4 stars

Then the sequel came out and gave us what we "wanted": More weapons and more bosses. While my memory is good enough to remember what most of them are, I don't remember the battles themselves. I never used that hammer or spear. Ever.

The "brutality" was also cranked up, which is just gobs of stupid, cos while Kratos is a complete asshole in the first one, it's all grounded in how Ares fucked him over. In the second one, he's just like, mad and smashing random dude's heads for not much reason. He's way less of an interesting character. I'm not saying he's god's gift to writing in the first one, but all the cool things about him are gone in #2 and he's just a whiny mad teenager yelling "ZEUS!" a lot and killing as many mythological characters for arbitrary reasons as possible.

Speaking of smashing heads those "press X now" minigames have to go. Mother of god. I dunno if it was because of wireless PS3 lag or because I suck at Simon, but it took me near 80 tries to beat Zeus at the end. You get to the end of the game and they ask you to play fucking Simon. No. I want a well thought out boss that is challenging via the actual gameplay, not some lame attempt to make the story sequences more interactive. I want a victory to come from my God of War skill, not from my eye's ability to tell my thumb "time to hit the X" correctly. If I wanted that game, I'd have bought it.

This game is solid in the gameplay department, but all the additions to the core gameplay are letdowns. Flying is boring, the hammer sucks, and the magics are all rehashes of the first one. Not a bad game by any means, but much like so many sequels these days, it's more of a version 1.1 than a true sequel. See also: Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto, SSX, Tony Hawk, Halo, etc...

2 stars