I also ended up playing God of War for the PS2 quite a bit over the weekend and I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t like the genre of platform 3rd person games with fixed cameras for a variety of reasons which I’ll get to but I wanted to cover GoW first. The story of GoW is actually quite enjoyable, the graphics are awesome, the art direction and theming greatly remind me of the Time Bandits movie. The part that is completely putting me off is the incessant, and repetitive fighting, pointless puzzles, fighting *during* pointless puzzles and the horrible preplaced camera angles. I had the same likes and dislikes with Prince of Persia, and Prince of Persia 2 too (heh, i just said tutu) though I did enjoy it’s puzzles quite a bit more because they made it more naturally flwo with the game. For the large majority of playtime in GoW, that I’ve experienced, there’s just a steady dribble of monsters who come at you in the game within formulaic ambushing, pointless, plot interrupting “pen” fights (where they errect magic red barriers within an area so you can’t skip these fights) with enemies who just appear out of the ground. Now, the game depends upon you “leveling up” your abilities, like swordfighting, through the acquisition of these “red orbs” which you get by killing monsters, or causing proptery damage (breaking pots, baskets, statues) which when enough are acquired unlock bigger and better ways to smash and kill. So they’ve given you an incentive to mindless kill things (and you’ll need to kill alot of stuff to get the really cool special effects too). This is like many games in many genres, for example, like practically every MMORPG out there, although they typically have a weaker main story and a stronger and more diversified power set. One of the other problem I have with platformers in general is the more linear nature of the game. All games have to be linear in some respect through a main story arc, but platformers tend to be the worse about it. And finally the fixed camera. This is nearly inexcusable to me. The game has such beautiful graphics but I don’t get to see enough of it because the stupid camera will not move. The game designers then took advantage of their craptacular design flaw and hide stuff in relatively easy places to reach, like above you on a rafter, but you’d never know it’s there becase again, you can’t move the stupid point of view. You can’t even switch into first person and just look around! Argh!
In retrospect, I think if they had made this game into an RPG, it would have been one of the greats. It had the potential with it’s story and the world they created to be an excellent RPG experience. It could have easily beaten Fable, even Morrowind, or even the KoTOR series, but perhaps that’s too optimistic.
Well, I’ll probably just play a bit further in the game, become more frustrated, and turn it back into Gamefly and move on to the next game, Jade Empire.