God of War Chains of Olympus

First, let's get this out of the way: the graphics in God of War: Chains of Olympus are truly top-notch stuff. The level of detail is highly impressive, and so is the shading. As well, the animation is quite fine: figures and objects respond pretty naturally to physical forces. Whatever visual pleasures the game offers, though, are offset by stilted gameplay and a pervasive, overall sense of turgidity.

Review of God of War: Chains of Olympus
by X-34 minus 5R1-6X36
Approximate hours played: 6-7


So far as I can tell, God of War is largely about opening doors. Kratos, our snarly, white-and-red-painted, muscle- a-ripplin' hero, grunts and struggles to lift, burst, or pry open all manner of portal, gate, door, egress, portcullis, and any other passageway-blocking apparatus you can imagine. It is one of the most tedious elements of the game. Not only do these doors show up in nearly every one of the game's settings, but a good deal of game time must be spent opening the damn things. For no reason at all, it generally takes Kratos a good ten seconds to huff and puff and yank open a heavy door, the result of which is … he gets to enter another room. That is, the endless array of doors and passageways bring nothing to bear on gameplay – they're just run-of-the-mill obstacles which take up lots of game time and offer no reward.

The game's designers are seemingly obsessed not only with doors but with stairs. Kratos must run up and down a huge number of staircases, often winding around spiral staircases for what seems like minutes before doing anything productive. Oh, and opening crates. Kratos loves to open crates. You can tell by how much time he spends doing it, especially when he's underwater.

In short, there's an imbalance in this game. Nearly all of the designers' skills seem to have gone into creating the backgrounds, which are, truly, extraordinary. Not that I've seen many PSP games, but God of War's graphics are better than them all. But even this fine achievement is undercut by the fact that the same graphical fastidiousness apparently went into the design of several pairs of naked goddess boobs. Athena's (or whoever's) twin scoops of ambrosia are so carefully, lovingly crafted that it made me laugh aloud. Are game designers so lonely and unloved that they need to spend six weeks creating the round, firm Globes of the Goddesses? Oh, this makes me sad. But not as sad as contemplating anyone who might be titillated by these highly out-of-place digital mammaries. C'mon, kids. The internet has lots of boobs on it. You can do better than this.

Far more problematic than the boobies is God of War's tedious symmetry, which infects it on every level. If there's a enemy / smashable object / architectural feature on the left side of the room, you can bet your loincloth there'll be one on the right, as well. Missions, too, are dully symmetrical: you gotta go up (usually by stairway), and then you gotta go back down again (by a second, symmetrically located stairway). You will also have to open a lot of doors.

As well, there's a kind of roteness to many of the missions and tasks. If you need a certain object or piece of magic to get past an obstacle, you will find that object or piece of magic immediately before it must be deployed. There's no figuring out when or how to use the thing; as soon as you get it, you know you must use it. God of War's narrative feels like it has been structured by a flowchart that had to be approved by six middle-managers before it got to the coding stage.

As Kratos progresses, he acquires new skills and moves. Many of these must be summoned by button combinations which are so needlessly arcane and complex as to be laughable. The result is that the game becomes a button-masher, for in the heat of battle, who can remember whether it's square-square-left-circle or square-square-left-X? Most enemies, seemingly, can be defeated by this mashing of buttons, but it's a dubious achievement, as it depends less on skill than on luck and flexible thumbs.

Clearly, this is not my kind of game. I realize it's a popular series, but I assure you that I have no interest in upsetting the applecart just for the sake of it. I found God of War dull.

Not only is God of War stodgy and needlessly complex, but it's a highly portentous game – there's not a whit of levity in the whole thing, and everything is all gloomy-and-doomy and smoke-filled and dire. This rigorous consistency of tone gets really tedious after a while, even though I know this is an accepted feature of games of this genre. But this is the kind of game in which every character speaks in Serious Pronouncements and uses “poetic” language that would make Homer's sightless eyes issue forth a torrent of tears. Kratos wears a sneer all throughout; he moves as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders (which I guess, in the universe of the game, it is); even his grapefruity muscles seem sullen. The poor guy never cracks a smile. Which is why one of the few moments of pleasure in this game occurred when I would hit “Jump” repeatedly: it sends sour old Kratos hopping around like a muscle-bound, Spartan jackrabbit, thereby adding a bit of life to the proceedings. Hippity hoppity, you red-stripèd warrior, you.