The new and rebooted God of War is earning all kinds of praise, and I absolutely can't wait to play it - which is why I spent ten hours of my weekend finally getting around to the last God of War game, a relatively lackluster adventure with a story I couldn't even begin to follow or comprehend. I mean, this game's so lazy with its own timeline that I was jumping back and forth between "present day" and "two weeks ago" while maintaining all my power-ups and items. Guys - shoddy level design!
It's been a year or two since I last played God of War, but one change I defintiely noticed was to the combat system here. It was just as QTE-laden as ever, but with an interesting new emphasis on grappling enemies form afar and whipping them around at one another. I liked it! What I didn't like, however, was the sheer volume of enemies. This wasn't a difficult game, save for one brutal gauntlet of enemies toward the very end, but holy crap was it a monotonous game. A giant elephant monster - cool! Hours later, three giant elephant monsters at once - holy shit, stop padding this thing!
It could just be that I'm getting dumber with age, but I also noticed a lot of puzzles in this game - more than one of which tripped me up and sent me for a walkthrough. (Though in my defense, at various points my game was just glitching out, not triggering, say, an opening door, for whatever reason. Lots of "restart form last checkpoint," I'm sorry to say. Again - sloppy!)
What's funny is, as always, hype and expectations. I wasn't as impressed by God of War III as I'd expected to be, but then, of course it's hard for a game to live up to the loftiest of expectations. By contrast, the muted response to this game had me prepared for the worst, and therefore pleasantly surprised for the most part by the experience I had playing it. Like, no question, God of War III is the better game, but Ascension wasn't nearly as far behind as the critical consensus would have had me believe.
Anyway, cool. Now that the six Greek games lie behind me, the Norse reboot lies ahead. Can't wait! (So, expect a post in 2020.)
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