GOD OF WAR

The main character is a great spartan warrior with red tattoos called Kratos. His story is revealed to the player in video cut scenes that appear every now and then as you proceed in the game. He shows no mercy and he slices and dices pretty much every person or creature that comes to his path. 

I purchased a PlayStation 2 less than a week ago and my first PS2 game for it was this one. 

To me GOD OF WAR seems like a perfected combination of PRINCE OF PERSIA, BATTLE OF OLYMPUS, CASTLEVANIA, TOMB RAIDER (especially puzzle-wise) and THE LEGEND OF ZELDA games. There's even some TEKKEN in the final fight with Aries. I've never played a game with such perfected game controls as this one. They're just so responsive and when you jump to your death it's always on you, not the controls.  Kratos can jump, dash, swim, dive, climb, hang, swing on ropes, balance his way on narrow bars plus he's got tons of cool combos to use in battle all named after gods in Greek mythology. 

The levels are big and pretty varied and there's quite a good amount of them. I especially liked the swimming element in some of them. They're not as clever puzzle-wise (like TWILIGHT PRINCESS for instance) but they're still good and there's not too much backtracking which is always positive. Also the puzzles are a bit too turn-this-lever-to-open-that-door -like but they still work and bring variety to the button smashing. There's only a couple of different weapons but both have a lot combos in them.

There's a good variety of different enemies in the game such as cyclopes, harpies, legionnaires, centaurs, minotaurs, seirens and medusas (I hate those bitches and how they chase you down with their stoning sight).

The "Path of Hades" level simply made me smile the first time I saw it. You could see the doomed souls falling to eternal pain and suffering everywhere you look. There's blood and bones and fire all over the place. Even the enemies are all on fire in this level. Very cool. And I died like 30-40 times during this level so it wasn't too easy (or then I suck, big time).


Simply put one of the best action-adventure games I've ever played, if not the best. And all the cons that come to mind are very minor and don't affect to the overall experience.

Pros:

+ Amazing visuals and stunning design both on creatures and the levels

+ Near perfect controls

+ Blood and gore

+ Level design

+ Cool enemies

+ Music

+ Story
+ Female nudity (in the beginning of second level you see two pairs of bare boobs)

+ The game's brutal anti-hero Kratos

+ The mini-games in battles are fun and rewarding

+ Barely any loading times and when they appear they're like 4 seconds max

+ Huge amount of combos to learn
+ A lot of replay value with several difficulty levels, Challenge of the Gods -mode, hidden chests and secrets (like five alternate costumes for Kratos)
+ Four different difficulty levels. Even the "normal" was quite challenging and there's two harder levels of difficulty:  "hard" and "god mode". The easiest way to ruin a good game is to make them too easy (no pun intended) and this game is NOT guilty of making that mistake

Cons:

- Too few boss battles as there were only like three or four

- I'd wanted the game to be longer, at least 20 hours, I just wasn't mentally finished with it when the credits started to roll just after 10 hours

- The puzzles are a bit too easy (though I needed online help in couple of them)

- You should be able to use the red orbs faster on weapons and magic abilities that need a lot of them. It can take like 30 seconds of pressing X-button to level-up, say, a weapon that uses 7500 orbs.
- After beating the game it would've been nice to have stats of your performance. E.g how many times you died, how many secret chests you found, how many enemies you killed and so on

I completed the game on "normal" difficulty and in the end the game clock showed 10 hours and 50 minutes and it took me three days. So not a very long game but the time it lasted it was just a phenomenal experience. I started a new game instantly on "hard". If you own a PS2 and haven't played this game go and buy it at this instant.

GOD OF WAR 2 is making it's way to my home via mail as I write this, so as soon as I've completed that one I'll review that one too. I have big hopes for it as it's said to be even better than this one.