God of War Review - Kratos is a Daddy now.

God of War turned out to be a bit of a surprise for me. There were a lot of things I was seeing about it that had me worried about what the product was going to be, especially since God of War 3 seemed like a perfect way to end the series. In some ways, the surprise was good, in other ways it wasn't.

The combat was a bit odd to get used too. Not because it doesn't handle well, but because it doesn’t really play quite like the other God of War titles. It's a lot more restrained, so you have to get used to a bit of a slower pace, focusing more on timing and position then you did previously. Not a bad change and the battles can still be a lot of fun, just a bit of a different kind.

You are now working with a variety of abilities that have a cooldown time on them. Arrows fired from Atreus's Bow and a Rune spell, an enchantment ability you an equip, and two rune attacks you can equip. Mix in some basic combo's from your regular attacks and you have a relatively in-depth combat system that gives you a lot of room to play around with. Once you get the second weapon I won't go into detail on, your options expand even farther.

Where the gameplay loses me a bit is the open world element they went with. There are a lot more things to discover and find, but it falls into the same problem a lot of open world games have where all the stuff you can do end up being tedious. There are some fun things, like the Arena areas in one realm you can go to and the Valkyrie fight, but there are also a lot of things that are just money and material, and a lot of boring and uninteresting fights you can get into. It's a mixed bag whether or not the additional activities are fun, but most of them weren't. Especially when you come across a side area you can't even finish yet because you have yet to unlock an ability, so you just end up retracing your steps a lot if you went exploring too early. And until you get the ability to travel back to the various portals you come across, this is a bit of a hassle.

The story is another mixed bag. The best part of the narrative if Kratos himself doing the best he can to try to be a good father to his son, with an ever-present paranoia his child could become the man Kratos use to be. It's a pretty fantastic way to continue the story of Kratos, even if I personally thought God of War 3 marked a near perfect end to the story of the character. And really the entire cast of characters is great, Baldr's story and his character was absolutely fascinating, though that will spoil too much so I won't get into it here.

The big issue I have is this entire game is building up characters like Odin and Thor, and you hear so much about the Ragnarok to come. Yet these aren't things that really come up at all, and as you realize this entire game was little more than a set up to the next game. I don't walk away from this feeling like a story was finished, I walked away feeling like I watched a teaser for a more interesting game to come. A really, really long teaser.

There is also a bit of a disconnect with the world lore. See, this is still the Kratos from the previous games, so you have this odd moment where there isn't even an attempt to reconcile the different lore of Greek and Norse myth. So many questions are raised, such as how was the world actually created? It's kind of best to just not think about it and ask questions because you will get no answers. In the end, as far as the story is concerned, there ended up being more that bothered me then I enjoyed, but what I enjoyed was fantastic.

If there is something that I had no issues with at all, it was the visuals and music. God of War has always had top-notch visuals with fantastic designs, and this game continues that. The small details like the blood stains on Kratos's bandages, how detailed the tattoos of Baldr are, and even the small bits of cloth in The Witch of the Woods' hair (I have no idea what to call them, hair bands? I am not a fashion expert) don't look all straight and neat, but are all angled differently as though an actual person put them in. This game is not slouching in its art direction.

I want to like God of War more then I do, but the game amounting to a promotion for the next one come that really lackluster ending took a lot of wind out of this games sales for me. The change in direction I can get behind, despite issues with the conflicting lore, and the characters are all pretty fantastic, but so much of this game is pointing to things more interesting than anything you are actually doing. So long as you think you can look past that, it's a solid game worth picking up if you have a PS4.