For some reason, I thought this was better than the first game on my first playthrough? It's definitely not, this is the Code Veronica of the series: some highly questionable design, but it's still a good game because the core gameplay loop is a lot of fun.
For example: some enemies have an invincible state, where you can do absolutely nothing; the elemental blades are super undercooked, making progression feel a bit unsatisfying; puzzles mostly have poor visual conveyance; enemy attacks have poor visual cues, making dodging much harder - I have never been juggled so many times in a GoW.
But there's more: parrying now requires an additional button for some God-forsaken reason; the scale and scope gets in the way of gameplay, it's incredibly common to have a hard time figuring out what the hell is going on; the Rage Meter is a new mechanic that exists by gimping the toolbox you already had, which is ????
To be fair, the "grab from a distance" is an improvement that improves the pacing of combat, but all this other stuff makes the combat pacing worse, so wah-wah.
And the story is a thing that exists. There is a small amnesia sub-plot going on, that I didn't even realize was a thing until the narrator stated at the end "then Kratos' memories came back", and I'm like "what".
At the end of the day, why they greenlit this game and gave it a budget of millions of dollars is a mystery. My theory is that the Sony's executives, in their infinite wisdom, saw the huge success of GoW3, then immediately had Santa Monica make another one thinking they could just replicate that.
For example: some enemies have an invincible state, where you can do absolutely nothing; the elemental blades are super undercooked, making progression feel a bit unsatisfying; puzzles mostly have poor visual conveyance; enemy attacks have poor visual cues, making dodging much harder - I have never been juggled so many times in a GoW.
But there's more: parrying now requires an additional button for some God-forsaken reason; the scale and scope gets in the way of gameplay, it's incredibly common to have a hard time figuring out what the hell is going on; the Rage Meter is a new mechanic that exists by gimping the toolbox you already had, which is ????
To be fair, the "grab from a distance" is an improvement that improves the pacing of combat, but all this other stuff makes the combat pacing worse, so wah-wah.
And the story is a thing that exists. There is a small amnesia sub-plot going on, that I didn't even realize was a thing until the narrator stated at the end "then Kratos' memories came back", and I'm like "what".
At the end of the day, why they greenlit this game and gave it a budget of millions of dollars is a mystery. My theory is that the Sony's executives, in their infinite wisdom, saw the huge success of GoW3, then immediately had Santa Monica make another one thinking they could just replicate that.