Now Playing: God of War

My initial impressions of Dad of Boy weren’t great. As much as I appreciated the impressive visuals and music, and as much as I liked the mythological aspects, the gameplay both in terms of exploration and combat was struggling to win me over. The question, I suppose, is that now I’ve completed the game – including all additional side content and post-game challenges – has my opinion on the game improved?

My answer is: yes . . . but not by much. God of War did get better, but not significantly better. I’m pleased to say that the game does open up and the exploration becomes more enjoyable, but only when you unlock unlimited fast travel and can avoid the tedious boat rides. Oh, and also once you’ve unlocked all of the necessary skills that were preventing you from fully exploring each area.

It took me around 14 hours to reach this point, although I probably could have reached it quicker if I’d skipped all the early side content and only focused on the core story – and that’s how I’d recommend playing God of War. Don’t bother with exploration until you’ve unlocked all of the skills you’ll need to access everything on the map, otherwise you’ll only have to backtrack to areas you’ve already been to in order to open the odd chest you weren’t able to on your first visit.

Spoiler: the chest probably won’t be worth the time or effort for the return trip, but if you’re like me, you really need to know for sure. God of War is a game obsessed with opening chests. Treasure chests are everywhere in God of War, and I mean everywhere. This is a problem that persists throughout the entire game. It’s a problem because a) there are so many of these chests that none of them feel like a genuine reward b) the ‘treasure’ is never anything that interesting and c) the animation for opening and claiming the treasure is identical for each chest type (there’s like 4 different chest types) regardless of what the chest contains.

Chests in God of War are boring. There’s zero excitement to opening them because you’re opening them every 5 minutes watching the same repetitive animation and the treasure is never anything unique.

The environments of God of War offer a decent variety of locations to explore. They’re all largely linear with the same kind of simple branching / looping paths, but they’re not . . .you know, bad. The environmental puzzles are all very basic but . . . fine, I guess. The climbing / jumping system in the game is also rather basic and more than a little tedious – Kratos is pretty slow, and you just press the A button when prompted.

The story is okay but I didn’t find it particularly engaging and I don’t think I ever really came to like or sympathise with Atreus. I did like all the mythological stuff, but the personal aspects of the story never quite won me over. Christopher Judge is great as Kratos though.

With regards to the combat, it does get better once you unlock a second weapon and essentially double your combat options. Being able to switch weapons on the fly and mixing up two sets of special attacks (fire & frost) suddenly makes combat far more engaging and enjoyable. Why? Because you can finally begin to chain together your moves and kills in a way that feels creative and satisfying.

The big problem with the combat though is the absolutely piss poor enemy variety. I’m not joking when I say you’ll have seen every enemy type that God of War has to offer within the first few hours of play. The game likes to play with the ‘elemental’ variations of the same enemy types – fire, ice, poison – which is absolutely fine, but there’s simply not enough of the base types.

The first time you fight a troll it’s a pretty cool mini-boss type encounter – until you fight a dozen more of them and they all end with exactly the same kill animation. In fact, every enemy type only seems to have a single kill animation which adds to the repetition when you’re fighting what feels like the same 4 basic enemy types throughout the entire game.

But there’s unique enemies to fight, right? Well . . . not really. There was one story based boss that I was expecting to be a unique creature, but it turned out to just be another f**king troll with a couple of unique attacks. Hell, the kill animation was the same for it, too. The most unique and I would say memorable fight in the game is when you fight two Gods at once – although even this fight is blighted by the ‘cinematic’ camera.

The ‘main’ boss is a guy you fight at the very beginning of the game, but half of this fight is a (admittedly impressive) cinematic that cuts seamlessly into the gameplay. Your next fight with this boss isn’t really a ‘fight’ at all – it’s a long cinematic in which you’re required to press the occasional button. And the final fight also suffers from the same problem as the first – just when you’re getting stuck in and trying to enjoy it, the camera wheels away and you realise you’re no longer in control. You’ve just got to sit back and wait for the ‘cinematic’ moment to end.

The optional Valkyrie fights are pretty okay, but nothing special. And as far as post-game content goes, you have two additional realms to explore – one of which is just a series of combat arena challenges with imaginative objectives such as ‘survive for 5 minutes’ and ‘kill 100 enemies’ which just means fighting waves and waves of the same f**king enemy types over and over again. None of them are particularly difficult. And then we have another realm with a somewhat randomised dungeon in which the objective is to collect a resource without being killed by enemies, traps or a toxic mist. It’s pretty simple and repetitive to run, but thankfully not as much of a grind as I’d first feared.

Oh, and before we wrap this review up, I have to talk about the absolute worst part of God of War in which you’re stuck on a flying boat and waves and waves and waves of the same enemies just keeping spawning in for what feels like forever. It’s excessive and irritating and not at all challenging – just really f**king tedious. GOTY? What the f**k are you smoking?

I said in my first impressions post that I didn’t understand why God of War was so highly praised. But I do now. I get it. Are you ready? It’s because God of War is casual as f**k. It’s easy and accessible and constantly rewards you even when you’ve done nothing to earn it.

It’s streamlined and linear and doesn’t require any real thought or strategy. You don’t need to learn anything new as you progress. You never need to adapt. And you know what? That’s fine. It’s an incredibly polished and undeniably ‘cinematic’ experience and I’m sure many other people will enjoy it. But me? F**k that.

God of War has some good stuff in it. The fact that I played all of it should tell you that. But it’s not a great game. Far from it. I can’t ignore the simplistic combat, repetitive animations and the absolutely terrible enemy variety. Or the bland as f**k UI and weapons / armour upgrade system. It’s a game I have zero interest in revisiting, and not just because I don’t want to have to sit through all those unskippable ‘cinematic’ moments again. I really hope the sequel isn’t just more of the same because if it is, I have no interest in playing it.

6/10