I went into this game with pretty high expectations and came out the other side disappointed. There is just so much bullshit to this game that made it to the final cut, for real I am convinced some of this shit was never playtested. So many pace breakers, so many anti-fun mechanics, so many fucking obnoxious design decisions. Enemies are damage sponges, don't get staggered and will have no reaction to the players attacks sometimes. Kratos' dodge roll is unusable because of the recovery time, also why in the name of god is it mapped to the right joy stick. The grab mechanic is barely funcional, which is especially worrying for something they make you use so much. The "platforming" is a joke, and apparently the developers weren't in on it. The tightrope sections should be removed from the game entirely. The QTE stuff fucking sucks and the time windows are so short you almost never get them first try. The combat encounters are repetitive as all hell. There are so many of these issues littered throughout the game and I started getting sick of it after like three hours of gametime, which is about a third of the whole experience.
There's definitely a lot of depth to the combat but I never really felt the need to experiment away from the three or four combos that I learned early on. Holy shit though, did the enemies manage to combo me, not because they have interesting and extensive movesets, no, just because there are so many times throughout the game when they will just swarm you and there is nothing you can do. The magic stuff is kinda cool but they give you most of it way too early on, so there's this long point in time where you aren't given any new abilities which just feels off after having recieved like four of them back-to-back.
As for the story, well I mean, I didn't really expect much here, and I was right, it's fine, it was never trying to tell some amazing story in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it's always cool to see these new and different interpretations of Greek mythology, but there wasn't all that much to any of the characters. Athena interests me cause she feels like this mastermind playing a game of chess with all the other gods, and Ares was alright, I don't know his character design is cool at least, I do really like Kratos' backstory though, and the reason as to why his skin is grey, that shit was cool.
I know that from this review it probably sounds like I hated this game, but there was a lot that I really like too. The combat is flashy enough to be satisfying, despite my earlier complaints. The boss fights, of which there are only three, were pretty cool, especially the minotaur one. The level design was awesome, I loved looping back around to places I'd already been through by finding all these different passageways, and it even felt reminiscent to a Legend of Zelda dungeon at times. The fixed camera angle was annoying sure, but it also led to some great shots and, almost always, kept focus on the action. The set pieces were a great distraction from the repetitive gameplay loop.
There is a lot to love with this game and I totally understand why people do hold it to such high regard, the problem is that there's a lot of stupid shit that you're gonna have to fight through to see why everyone talks about this game. I am more hopeful for the second and third games, but for now this has been my reaction to the pre 2018 God of War games.
There's definitely a lot of depth to the combat but I never really felt the need to experiment away from the three or four combos that I learned early on. Holy shit though, did the enemies manage to combo me, not because they have interesting and extensive movesets, no, just because there are so many times throughout the game when they will just swarm you and there is nothing you can do. The magic stuff is kinda cool but they give you most of it way too early on, so there's this long point in time where you aren't given any new abilities which just feels off after having recieved like four of them back-to-back.
As for the story, well I mean, I didn't really expect much here, and I was right, it's fine, it was never trying to tell some amazing story in the first place. Don't get me wrong, it's always cool to see these new and different interpretations of Greek mythology, but there wasn't all that much to any of the characters. Athena interests me cause she feels like this mastermind playing a game of chess with all the other gods, and Ares was alright, I don't know his character design is cool at least, I do really like Kratos' backstory though, and the reason as to why his skin is grey, that shit was cool.
I know that from this review it probably sounds like I hated this game, but there was a lot that I really like too. The combat is flashy enough to be satisfying, despite my earlier complaints. The boss fights, of which there are only three, were pretty cool, especially the minotaur one. The level design was awesome, I loved looping back around to places I'd already been through by finding all these different passageways, and it even felt reminiscent to a Legend of Zelda dungeon at times. The fixed camera angle was annoying sure, but it also led to some great shots and, almost always, kept focus on the action. The set pieces were a great distraction from the repetitive gameplay loop.
There is a lot to love with this game and I totally understand why people do hold it to such high regard, the problem is that there's a lot of stupid shit that you're gonna have to fight through to see why everyone talks about this game. I am more hopeful for the second and third games, but for now this has been my reaction to the pre 2018 God of War games.