transient thoughts

With our little stint at TGS nearly a full week ago, it occurs to me that I got my hands on more games than I have mentioned here. Fortunately, I made quite a few notes following each demo – it seems there is at least one positive thing to be said for all the time I spent in queues.

Anyways, next up: God of War 3.

Again, I got about 15 minutes of demo time. Fortunately, the language barrier was less of an issue than with Heavy Rain. I’ve been playing through GoW: Chains of Olympus recently, which has been a good reminder of what the series is about, and how it plays, and GoW3 looks to stay pretty true to that original formula.

Graphically, the game looks pretty good. Kratos is nice and detailed, as are the hordes of foes you’ll be facing off against. A few particular changes I noticed are with the orbs and chests – the former seem a lot smaller than previous games, which is a big improvement. It’s kind of unfortunate that they’re still just bland glowing coloured orbs, it would’ve been nice to see a little more detail in them. The chests look a lot better now though – they now bear a coloured omega instead of glowing out the top.

The gameplay still works much the same as well. Kratos’ twin blades are still just as quick and deadly. A nice addition was with the grab – instead of the usual grab and kill, Kratos had a few options once he grabbed an opponent, triggered by different face buttons. Circle was the traditional stabby death; triangle lifted them above Kratos’ head, before ripping them in half; and square allowed you to charge through other enemies, using the held one as a shield, with Kratos flinging the enemy at the end of the dash (or repeatedly smashing their head into a wall, should one be sufficiently close).

The demo also allowed you to use a 2nd weapon for Kratos, a pair of large gauntlets that could be used to pound enemies into submission, or thrown outwards before being yanked back together on chains, again for large damage. While I’ve always preferred faster weapons to the slower ones, the addition of extra weapons could help to add some more diversity to the action as well (they’re mapped to the d-pad, so there will probably be 4 different ones). It was hard to tell how much of a tactical decision weapon choice will be – personally I’d like to see each weapon have it’s own niche, and weapon switching be necessary to success.

The grisly kill QTE’s for larger enemies make a comeback too. Presumably to make it a little easier, the prompts now appear at the appropriate edges of the screen (triangle at the top, circle on the right, etc), although this did make it a little hard when playing standing less than half a meter from a 30-ish inch screen. This is one aspect I’m not entirely sold on – while QTE’s were significant element of previous titles in the series, they are a mechanic that seems to have fallen out of favour somewhat.

Speaking of grisly, one thing that did bother me is that, despite all the gouts of blood that spurt everywhere, none of it ever end up on anything, be it Kratos, other enemies, or even the environment. It just seems to evaporate shortly after leaving the body. Admittedly, this is something that bothered me more watching the trailer, but how much more brutal would Kratos feel if he ended up coated in hie enemies’ blood (like Uncharted’s Drake’s T-shirt, but less water and more blood)?

For the nitpicking I have, this does still seem like a solid title, with tight controls and everything that made the earlier titles so much fun. What I’ll be waiting to see is exactly what this game is going to add to the mix.

written by .klik2