Overall I enjoyed God of War. It was a classical, well designed action adventure game that executed all of its objectives well. The game was a cinematic experience that got me curious to learn more about Norse mythology over my 35 hour playthrough. The game is a very tight, linear experience that adeptly executes on its level design, combat, and progression systems - however there is nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking about it and overall it's story lacks a message. Over and over as I kept playing it I kept remembering how I felt playing Resident Evil 4, another very tightly designed, polished game which was elevated to greatness thanks to an over the shoulder camera which was revolutionary at the time. God of War has no such transcendental feature. It is not a must-play by any means, but it would make an excellent way to introduce new gamers to what an extremely polished, well designed game looks like. Here are more specifics about what I liked and did not like, divided into categories based on what I think are the key aspects of the game. Presentation 9/10: Unique, gorgeous and cinematic This is where the game shines. The graphics hold up to this day - a big part of that thanks to an art style that's varied, vivid, and filled with colors that burst off the screen. The linear design of the game allows the camera to really focus on the vistas as you enter a new area, and this makes exploration fun and rewarding. Videogames are saturated with settings inspired by Norse mythology, but this is by far the best looking one. The animations for both your protagonists and the enemies are fantastic and full of expression and character. The cutscenes (and specfiically the transitions between gameplay and cutscenes) are fantastic, hollywood quality stuff. The dialogue is snappy and full of gems, and makes even the really unlikeable characters (we'll get to that later) enjoyable and interesting. All of the voice actors are fantastic. My favorite part of this game were the combination boss fight/cutscenes with a recurring character. Every single time that character showed up on screen, I would pause and grab a snack to chow down on as I prepped for a super gratuitous, beautifully directed fight with just enough gameplay to feel personally engaged. This would be a great game to watch a Let's Play of. Combat and Progression 7/10: Simple, cinematic, and expressive but eventually tedious and poorly balanced The combat is carried by the excellent animation work and special effects on display. Immediately when you start your first fight, you'll notice through the animations how much force Kratos puts into his axe swings, and you'll see that translate through to impact on the enemy watching their body swing off center from the weight of the blow. Mid and lategame fights are filled with slow motion moments before you unleash your magic abilities, or as Atreus fills the screen with his supporting moves. Its an extremely gratuitous spectable thats very easy to pick up and play. You have a light attack, a heavy attack, as well as a bunch of combos depending on how you alternate those two attacks. The basic light attack and heavy attack combos are more than sufficient to get you through most of the game, but the advanced combos that you can unlock via spending XP do much more damage and are much flashier. In addition to these you have a standard block, dodge, and parry system that has extremely forgiving timing and iframes making survivability trivial. Finally you have 3 magical abilities that operate on cooldowns, these are extremely well animated moves that typically do AOE damage. You can find, equip and upgrade your light and heavy runic attacks, but your talisman ability is special since it is tied to equipment which also provides stat bonuses and enchantment slots. You then apply that same moveset across your axe, your barefists, a rage mode (where hits stagger enemies and restore health), and a lategame weapon tied to the story. Your axe has the added ability be thrown from range at an enemy - the heavy throw impales and freezes weaker enemies, but requires you to manually recall the axe - whereas the light throw boomerangs back shortly after impact. Bolstering these ranged options, you are supported by Atreus who gets a dedicated button for his two moves - tap to shoot arrows, and hold to use an AOE damage summon. Overall the basic combat system gives players a ton of ways to deal with enemies in both simple and flashy methodologies. Supporting this is a skill tree system that focuses more on giving the player additional abilities rather than minor stat adjustments. These abilities are the aspects that add flashiness and complexity to the system. There are multiple options for the magic abilities, atreus's summon, and your talisman, but they're all essentially the same and can be interchanged based on which one looks cooler. The problem with the combat in this game is centered around the enemies and gear systems. There are about 10 archetypes of enemies that each get 3 different skins corresponding to their element. This extends out to the minibosses as well. You will be fighting the same enemies over and over again the entire game, the only interesting moments being when you are first introduced to a new archetype and have to learn its moves and animations. All of the enemies have extremely telegraphed moves and their weaknesses boil down to "don't use their own element against them". This lack of variety in combat and encounter design leads to the frequent and mandatory becoming a chore later in the playthrough, after you've upgraded and mastered your moveset, but still have 10-15 hours of content remaining. Gear is also terribly handled. There are multiple early game, mid-game, and late-game sets to choose from. Each mid-game and late-game set requires specific items that come from either a particular region or particular enemy type. This results in a lot of potential grinding to get the absolute best gear since the whole progression system is tied to your gear level. On the default difficulty setting this system will just make you overpowered if you explore the game thoroughly and regularly swap to the next tier of gear. This OPness exascerbated the tedium of late game combat by further reducing the challenge. On higher difficulties upgrading your gear becomes mandatory unless you want to spend hours chipping away at reskinned minibosses that take you down in 2 hits. Each piece of gear also has enchantment slots, and you typically just want to pick the highest level ones since gear level is king here. other than that they provide minimal passive buffs and conditional bonuses. 99% of the enchantemnts you'll find will be useless, but their contribution to gear level makes them necessary to pay attention to - the perfect intermittent reward mechanic for this pavlovian machine. The game on normal difficulty seems balanced around a playthrough where you don't use any of the gear other than the default(s) that you find along the critical story path, while higher difficulties feel balanced around a completionist mentality without fundamentally changing the strategy or flow of combat itself. Exploration, Level Design, and Puzzles: 7/10 Simple, effective, formulatiic This game executes well in all of the above aspects. The game is built around a circular hub area which consists of a lake with a temple in the middle and a bunch of little islands along the outer rim. Outside this hub area are small channels or offshoots which lead to the "dungeons" of this game. In the center of the hub area is a teleporter mechanic which lets you access additional realms - which function effectively the same as dungeons. Both the hub area and the dungeons are littered with collectibles, treasure chests, high level combat encounters, and your merchant(s). Connecting all of these points of interest are relatively linear levels which clearly guide you to the main objecti
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