Developed for the PS3 by Studio Santa Monica

Published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Rated "M" for Mature.

Contains blood and gore, intense violence, nudity, strong language, strong sexual content

 

There are many motives that can drive a need for revenge; honor, love, survival, but Kratos, a Spartan warrior in an age of Greek mythology, is fueled by a far weaker and sadder emotion; resentment. He bemoans everyone and everything around him, a vengeful column of rage and entitlement, who has retreated to value his anger over all else and defend it at absolute cost in order to keep the sense of superiority it gives him. He has committed atrocities, even murdered his own family, and while he could blame the manipulations of the Gods and their petty squabbles, the truth is he’s that callous and uncaring of a man. He hates life, and would end it if he could, but since he keeps coming back from the dead, he sets out to seek revenge by murdering those who’ve shaped existence - Zeus the King of Gods and anyone who gets in the way.

Kratos is by no means a role-model or even an anti-hero. He is a foundation towards a kind of gallows humour and extreme action. He and the fantasy beasts and figures he battles exude a towering power and weight as they toss, smack, and bludgeon each other about. The game consists of Kratos working his way through the Olympus catalog, killing every God, demigod, titan, hero, and monster. Enchanted swords and magical blades whip and slice about in showers of blood until Kratos finishes it by ripping off an appendage, decapitating a head or disemboweling a beast with anything handy. He hacks at ganglion nerves, cracks open spinal columns, and twists off all kinds of appendages – horns, wings, and claws. At one point he keeps the head of a god and uses it as a kind of flashlight, its open mouth letting out an undead wail as it spills light out into the gloom. He’s not the type to rescue those who need to be saved, and is more likely to kill a fleeing citizen for being in the way than to help them, an act that is so counter to the conventions of video games that it becomes a hard one to follow through on.

The impressive nature of the God of War has been its exemplary sense of art production. Every god and magical beast is perfectly expressed in wondrous detail. Gods and titans are given the kind of scale and immense presence that well, you only see in children’s books, where faces loom like planets as they bend down towards Kratos, so small and tiny, and the space between the two is somehow given a sense of intimacy. The PlayStation 3 does more than ramp up the detail, itself now enough to steal your breath, but it adds a level of expression to the faces, movement to the creatures, that give them more life, make them intriguing the moment they appear on screen, from the simple creatures you meet on the war path; the Chimeras, golden and fierce, the Minotaurs, trudging with the soulful eyes of cows, to the major characters themselves. Hephaestus is perfectly expressed, a hunchback blacksmith packed into a closet-like space in Hades, using his giant fingers to work within a cramped space and Pandora, a freckled-face girl, exuberant even while frightened, give the game a much-needed sense of depth and emotion. It’s clear now that you could make a game that is driven as much by acting as action.

God of War III is the Babylon of video games, its levels are massive and majestic. It begins with you fighting on the back of the titan Gaia and not only is that level immense, larger than any of the previous levels in the first two God of War games, but it exists as a character model itself, reactive and animating in response to the battles taking place atop it. The palaces, gardens, and underground chambers throughout the game feature a sense of architecture that captures a sense of grandeur and creativity. There’s one level that includes a labyrinth made up of hanging cubes and it just seems to stretch on forever and takes hours to explore. It reminded me of the hanging cages in Time Bandits mixed with the tortuous complex of Cube where you must painfully move from one cage to the next. At one point you enter a cube that rotates with spiked walls as masses of enemies are dumped in, forcing you to fight in what seems like a blender. Just astonishing.

While the basic gameplay is button-mashing hack-and-slash, where you take on hordes of creatures, moving constantly to their flank and rear to send out swirling blades, many of the game’s sections include puzzles that, with levels now at a larger scale, take on an interesting presence. Large chambers deliver interesting mechanisms to figure out that can include shifting walls, connected portals, mazes with paths linked by optical illusions, it’s not just that the solutions are always interesting, but that you’re given enough space to see the puzzle in its entirety and pieces that have a weight to them when you move them.

There are new weapons and special powers, you can summon souls to fight on your behalf including a phalanx of Spartan soldiers to temporarily protect you, but no real dramatic change to the gameplay from the two previous games in the trilogy. Doesn’t need it, to be honest. The real difference is the environment itself which better lends itself to fighting, climbing walls, gliding on Icarus wings, and moving hand-over-hand along cables and ropes.

It’s more than just a better space for the action to take place within, the game camera itself is used with wild innovation, expertly moving in and out of sequences to keep a sense of scale, always making the larger gods loom while never diminishing Kratos in his presence. At times the camera moves into the heads of other characters, shifting perspective and playing with movements that try to take moments of brutal fighting and give them a context to make you think. It creates a number of first-time experiences for gamers and well, you’ll have to play to understand what I mean.

God of War III is the final part of a trilogy and if fans can be thankful of one thing, it’s that it has a proper ending, one that has been well thought out, has something to say, and delivers an experience that is designed to make you feel like you went through all three games for a reason. In God of War II Kratos had taken his anger to adolescent extremes, coming off more as the God of Temper Tantrums than the God of War he declared himself as, to the point where even his creators felt it was getting thin, and so in this final act they have thankfully reigned him in and we’re given a Kratos that’s more purposeful, who chooses his words more carefully, and reaches a point where he delivers something to think about. It’s been an incredible, visceral spectacle, but you get the sense that its creators are ready to move on and that in itself is intriguing.