Fighting a god from a vantage on top of a giant, God of War III starts with operatic grandeur and scale, turning and twisting as part of an even larger battle. It’s a statement of intent that it follows through on. You control Kratos as a whirl of fury, blades flashing all around. No sooner has the game put up its title than something crashes through it. Even moving between pause menu screens is a ridiculously ostentatious display of sound and vision. God of War II was a final demonstration of just how far the limits of the PlayStation 2 could be pushed in service of the epic, and its sequel is the result of that momentum continuing in the absence of such limits.
As you’re sent to hell and back, and fight through the pantheon of gods, It’s all remarkably, unnecessarily, terrifically grand. For a specific type of grandeur where blood is measured in buckets, and you’re controlling a one dimensional rage monster whose only care is for revenge and ripping off the head of whoever is next in the way of getting that revenge. It’s a certain limited vision of the purpose of games as male power fantasy taken to an illogical extreme, complete with a sideline in pornographic sex so male-gazed-up that it doesn’t even show the man involved.
Maintaining the intensity required for this approach is an interesting challenge, and one which it tackles in some effective ways. Multi-stage boss fights with gods are a video game staple for a reason, but crafting an entire game of them means having to come up with different ways to make them stand out. So you get, for instance, having to rip Hades’s heart out from his chest and then make your way to attack it before it blobs its way back to re-unite with him, followed by a giant tug of war across the river Styx.
There’s also a fine tuning of the dynamic where opponents get increasingly powerful with each stage of a fight before being totally weakened for a final stage where you get to kill them in an inventively horrible way via matching a series of button prompts. This is also replicated in miniature with other enemies throughout the game, each fight its own epic chronicle. The presentation of every bit of this is extraordinarily slick, if a bit exhausting at length.
The thing with playing God of War III now, though, is not just that the mainstream of games has largely evolved in narrative attitude (I didn’t find I appreciated the honesty of its grotty brutality to anything like the same extent as Barbarian back in the day, but there’s some through line). It’s that its specific gameplay has so visibly evolved.
You can create all kinds of glowing lines on screen, grab enemies and battering ram them into each other, and rack up combos into the hundreds, but since most of the time is not spent on cannon fodder that largely comes across as window dressing. Much more of it is carefully dodging powerful attacks and taking any small opportunity to stick in a counter. I have spent a lot of time lately playing modern games with similarly fixed cameras and that kind of dramatic combat, even if they involve playing as a cute bird or a cute fox rather than an angry bald man. I enjoy a tough but fair boss fight. And god, God of War III feels so hopelessly woolly next to the state of the art.
Those spectacular looking camera angles sometimes actively obscure the action. Plus there is the occasional absolutely terrible UI decision, like the counter you have to do through a half-circle of the left stick, presented through showing a half circle arrow round a stick in the middle of the screen with no indication that it doesn’t mean the right stick. Mostly though, the problem stems from the ill fit between what you can do and what you need to do.
Kratos has all of these complicated powerful moves with all these different controls, can roll and double jump and run, but he’s tied down into really specific situations where he has to do really exact things and it all feels way too loose. The QTE button pressing sequences come as a relief because they’re the only time that the game feels as precise as it needs to. In a sense, being forgiving makes sense in-story, though. To get too tight and tense would downplay the godliness of its main character. After three games of getting ever more powerful and epic, the demands of gameplay challenge and the demands of power fantasy have become fundamentally incompatible.
Top of the charts for week ending 20 March 2010:
