Okay, that title is a little harsh for such an exciting game, but I’ll try to justify it. My God of War 3 experience had its ups and downs, but presentation was what helped me see it through to the end. Not the greatest compliment, but it’s more than I can say for Darksiders, Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, all of which are good games. Kratos’ achillies heel it turned out to be coarseness and storytelling and both prevented God of War 3 from being next-gen. And by next-gen I mean next-gen in terms of the experience offered, not the tech used.
The guys at Sony Santa Monica did an amazing job of crushing the bugs that break immersion and make the game experience less fluid. Things like perfect transitions between pre-rendered and game cinematics, virtually no loading and I never once saw a texture stream in or an LOD pop. Despite that amazing and immersive attention to detail, two very simple features consistently broke my immersion: death and saving. My battle with the 1000ft tall titan was ruined at least once when I missed a single button press and was greeted with the death screen. The save system also did an amazing job of pulling me out of the fiction when the PS3 UI popped up (HI I’M UR PS3) so I could save my game. It’s actually because they did such an amazing job of squelching all the other video game annoyances that I can even mention these two issues, but they stick out like a sore thumb.
Granted the God of War franchise has never been huge on story but the plot and writing in God of War 3 is just plain bad. And now that I’ve played Mass Effect 2 and Heavy Rain, it’s pretty bad for a video game. It’s the same old cheesy dialog and the same old overdone characters and the same old nonsensical plot. I appreciate story to tie my gameplay together but would it have been so hard to give Kratos a zelda style fairy to tell him what needed smashing? It certainly would have been cheaper.
Speaking of cheesy video game tropes, the sex game in God of War gave me flashbacks to working on Saboteur. “We open on tits,” now those are great memories. I’d like to think when I was a kid I wasn’t so dazzled by digital boobs, except, there was Duke Nukem.