The eagerly anticipated God of War 3 is out this week and the good news for fans is that it’s just what they wanted. Its jam packed with Greek mythology, Monsters and Gods, all that good stuff. It is full of stunning scenery and most importantly blood lots of it and its everywhere even the skeletons bleed!! You smash skulls into walls, poke out eyes and smash in faces literally!

  Yes, Kratos is back this time on PS3 and yes he is still pissed.  If you are a fan and have played the first 2 games you probably don’t need to read on much more. If on the other hand if you are new to GOW then read on….

The game? I don’t really need to explain too much as its quite simple. You play Kratos a Spartan warrior out for revenge. You kill everything and I mean everything that stands in your way. You do this by spinning blades attached by chains to your arms, around you in large crowds. In what is best described as a health and safety nightmare. Along the way you add more weapons including bows and arrows, claws and big metal boxing gloves.

Stringing together combos is the idea here but for a lot of the early parts its just button bashing. It’s like this until you are past the first few hours then you start to unlock moves for your weapons increasing the combos you can pull off. These new moves are unlocked by spending orbs. Orbs are collected from destroying things and handy stone chests that have been left laying around the place just full of orbs health or magic.  

Other than that you fight big monsters and every level seems to have a number of big boss characters to fight off.  They often don’t seem to take much thinking to defeat.  With most fought off by just wailing on them. The odd occasion they are a bit trickier requiring some quick thinking. Most end with a series of Quick time events moved on by timed hits of the buttons. This is where new comers will start to get annoyed. Missing a button press will result in you having to go back and start the whole sequence again along with cut scenes and intros to the boss. It can get very frustrating if you die a lot.  

The second thing to annoy you is that the check points are quite spread out so if you do happen to fall off the edge because the buttons didn’t register your second jump you will travel back a good section that will need to be repeated. Double jump is over used in the game so this happens a lot. I died way too often this way. If I see "restart checkpoint" again anytime soon ……..

It is an intense game the action is pretty constant but is broken up by certain puzzle elements. These are usually quite easy as they require no logical thinking in fact logic is the last thing you should use as not much thought as gone into them. They seem to be put there to pad out the game and add very little more to it.

The graphics are impressive the locations are top notch the effect of the marble floors and water are brilliant. But its mainly back ground work  that you don’t interact with so you would expect it to be that good. The in game animation is quite good and as always the impressive stuff is in the cut scenes.

God of War 3 is a bit more than a mindless button basher but not much, but that’s what the fans wanted. But to an outsider it does become repetitive at times. Any time you enter a circular room for example you know a gates is going up and you have to fight a bunch of enemies until it drops and you can advance to the next circular room.

It is very liner you have one path and that’s the way you follow you aren’t given moral choices to make like in other games. The items you collect include the Eye the feathers and the horns. Just like the previous games you use these to get extra health or magic etc. It all feels like we have done this all before.  

Over all fans wont care about its faults  in fact they will rejoice in it not pandering to the mass market and probably most of the things that annoyed me are what fans like about it.  To new comers I’m sure the vast majority of you will enjoy it although I found Darksiders to be a more enjoyable experience to be honest.

It is a epic scale told on a big stage but you would want to be ready to bash those buttons. Great at times but flustrating in equal meassures at others.


SCORE : 85%