Game reviews: God of War III

Every gamer’s favourite patricidal lunatic returns for the last time in this trilogy-completing instalment, the first God of War title for PlayStation 3.

And never has mangled Greek mythology looked so good, the high-definition PS3 offering an incredibly detailed romp through an incredibly detailed fantasy world.

To prove its point, the game’s opening is a real look-at-me statement. It begins where God of War II left off, with antihero Kratos being carried up Mt Olympus by the skyscraper-sized Titan Gaia for a deity dust-up. The cameras swoop in and out while you battle Kratos’s enemies on Gaia’s back, first as tiny dots, then as fully realised, close-up animations. Once in close, the puckered sword wound on Kratos’s torso is detailed enough to make you wince. It’s impressive stuff.

GoWIII isn’t just about the aesthetics, though. Sony Computer Entertainment’s Santa Monica studio has tried to inject a modicum of pathos, with Kratos the Greek tragic hero, riding a path to his own destruction through the flaw of his single-minded desire for revenge. It’s not as if GoWIII spends a lot of time contemplating the dark night of Kratos’s soul or anything, but there is a self-reflexivity to the character this time around that you don’t often find in a video game. Certainly not a video game as violent as this one.

The combat sequences are eye-wateringly graphic; heaven knows how GoWIII avoided an R18 censor’s rating. It’s all done in a very straight-faced manner, too. For all that Grand Theft Auto, say, is brutal, the violence is cartoonish, there’s almost – almost – a humorous edge to it, the computer game equivalent of a Tarantino movie. By contrast, God of War III’s director, Stig Asmussen, has stated that if any of the action made the development team laugh, it was cut. The violence is there because Kratos’s raison d’àªtre is to hurt things – people, monsters, combinations thereof; when Kratos rips an opponent’s head off (and he does with some regularity), you know he means it. That’s fair enough.

It’s consistent, too. No one buying this game can claim that the first two instalments led them to believe God of War III would be about people dancing in meadows and stroking bunnies. However, the violence is this time made all the more visceral by the quality of the graphics.

So God of War III is bigger, more epic (naturally), the sense of scale is breathtaking. It must be a better game than God of War II. It has to be. But it’s not. It’s an amazing technological feat, to be sure. Yet there’s an uncomfortable sense that a lot of what appears on screen is only there because the designers were skilled enough to make it happen.

For example, lead in-game designer Bruno Velazquez told Tone that the chimera beastie, part lion, part snake, part goat, was retrieved from the scrap bin of God of War II, where it had been discarded as too difficult to integrate into the game. The PS3 makes such things possible. But it looks kind of daft, as would anything sewn together from such disparate parts. It simply didn’t need to exist in the game; it’s there because it can be. What next? A creature that’s part piano, part Swiss ball, part 20th century modernist poem? They could probably animate that, too, so skilled are developers nowadays. Would you want to, though? (If anybody does want to, we’re open to a royalty agreement.)

The level design isn’t as good as God of War II’s, either. The new game lacks God of War II’s scope, its vision. That too may be a function of technology. As advanced as God of War II was for its day, in retrospect it appears that the platform’s limitations made the developers work harder in other areas. The earlier game’s the puzzles are that bit more fiendish, the plot that tiny bit more plausible.

For God of War III, then, substitute Rocky 3. This game is flabbier, carrying a bit more weight than its predecessors. It still has the ability to deliver knockout blows, but it has to work harder than it used to, and there’s more pain along the way. Of course, God of War has one great advantage over Sylvester Stallone: it’s quitting while it’s still a champion. RB

PLATFORM: PS3

PLAYERS: 1

RATING: 16

GENRE: Action-adventure

OVERALL: 4