The first God of War game is a very good action adventure game with a story that is interesting and Kratos is an interesting character that is a good anti-hero type. To me he works very well as a character that is very angry and self-serving, not caring what he has to do or who has to kill to reach his goals but he does have some deeper motivations with a tragic backstory that helps to make him a compelling character.
The technical side of the game is good for how old it is, the environments look very nice and have a grand scale to them and important characters have nice looking models, as do most of the enemies but unnamed npcs that aren't enemies can look kind of rough and dated. The music also fits very well, with it being very epic sounding and providing a nice background to everything going on, its not something I would listen to outside of playing the game but it is very fitting and sets the mood well.
Most levels are designed well and flow together very nicely, I never really got lost or stuck, only the desert area can be a little annoying but it wasn't too difficult to navigate. Most of the puzzles in the game were what I would consider a good level of complexity for this type of game, where it wasn't extremely obvious every time but you also didn't have to sit and think about it or have to look up what to do. The secrets are the same way as the puzzles where they're not right out in the open and extremely easy to find but as long as you're thorough and checking every room closely then you should be able to find all the upgrades and get enough red orbs to upgrade all your weapons and abilities. The cinematic camera does a good job of helping to bring attention to the important things in the rooms for puzzles, as well as kind of hiding secret chests and areas in rooms by having it angled a certain way so you can't really see, but overall it does a good job following Kratos around and it almost never caused me any issues.
The meat of the game is the combat though and I do really enjoy the system in these games. It is fluid and feels good and responsive most of the time, the only thing that could feel wonky in my opinion is the about half a second of recovery frames after you finish a dodge roll where Kratos can't move or attack, other than that though it is simple and maybe lacks some complexity of other games of this type but it is fun and that's the most important thing. One negative about the combat is that I felt like late game the enemies become better able to break out of combos and start to dodge or block a lot of your attacks which can slow down combat. You have your basic combos with your blades of chaos that you start with but as you progress you'll get magic abilities from the greek gods as well as a secondary sword and all these weapons and abilities can be upgraded to give you even more moves and combos with them. The flashiness of the combat is also very fun with kratos having lots of special kill animations and most enemies having special QTE kill sequences that are very brutal and fun to watch. The enemy variety I also found to be good, with lots of different creatures from Greek mythology and they all had their own styles and gimmicks to them.