He demonstrates that perhaps it is the gods who have something to learn from us. In the end, after bashing in all those skulls, the emotionally bereft Kratos does find some measure of redemption. At higher levels the game delivers a somewhat more technical challenge but is never as demanding as the serious Japanese fighting games. Likewise, God of War III’s combat maintains the series’s tradition of being easy enough for even the most ham-handed players to be able to mash their way through at lower-difficulty levels. Escher, though I won’t give away which one.) (One particular brainteaser is clearly inspired by one of the famous works by the Dutch artist M. The puzzles generally revolve around making clever use of the virtual physical environment and, most important, they make sense rather than feel arbitrary. In terms of the gameplay mechanics, the team at Sony’s studio in Santa Monica clearly wasn’t trying to get cute by tinkering with the felicitous blend of combat and puzzle-solving that has been God of War’s foundation. But in its tight design, fluid combat and generally excellent animation, the new game maintains God of War’s role as one of the definitive action-game franchises. The art direction does not possess the range and creative diversity of 2007’s God of War II for all of its high-resolution beauty on the PlayStation 3, the infernal environments of God of War III can feel a bit monotonous.
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The brilliance of the God of War series has always been in its balanced, accessible combination of simple logic puzzles woven into its virtual environments and visceral, blood-spewing melee combat. Instead the player hears Aphrodite’s passion while watching the reaction of her two topless handmaidens. The one sex scene in the game is an entirely consensual coupling of Kratos and Aphrodite (while the hapless cuckold Hephaestus labors at his forge next door) that is not even pictured on screen. As you might expect, the game has nothing to do with the innumerable instances of sexual exploitation, genital mutilation, incest and various other outrageous sexual crimes that are basically the backbone of the Greek sagas. Really, though, it is merely a visualization of but a few of the atrocities that the gods routinely inflict on humans and one another in the myths.Īnd as someone who has recently been reading Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” I almost came away from God of War III wondering at how tame the game is. So yes, guts spill out, and heads and other limbs are ripped off, as Kratos hacks and slashes his way through Hades and Tartarus. And with the possible exception of Hephaestus (voiced wonderfully by Rip Torn), the player is quite happy to have seen them all variously beheaded, disemboweled, drowned and otherwise dispatched. Brutal and bereft of any compassion or consideration, Kratos nonetheless earns the player’s empathy simply because the gods and other immortals are so obnoxious.īy the time Kratos reaches his final confrontation with Zeus around 15 hours into the game, Hades, Helios, Hephaestus, Hera, Hercules, Hermes and Poseidon, not to mention the titan Cronos, are all dead. Empowered by Athena, Kratos set off on a grand mission of revenge that now, in the new God of War III, published by Sony for the Playstation3, has delivered him to the pinnacle of Olympus as he seeks to slay Zeus himself.īy now, Kratos has become so consumed by his bloodlust for Zeus that the exact root of his motivation in the new game is almost irrelevant. When we first met Kratos, five years ago in the original God of War, he had just been deceived into killing his wife and family by the god he had sworn to serve, the blackhearted Ares. In video games that suspicion has been given the graveled voice of Kratos, the tormented Spartan soldier who is one of the most compelling video game characters of the last half-decade. In fact they are generally less moral than humans because they have been corrupted by their power.įor thousands of years people have suspected that the gods jealous, greedy, deceitful and altogether selfish are just messing around up there and may not actually have humanity’s best interests at heart. One of the great motifs of the ancients was that the gods were just as, uh, human, as the rest of us. There are few good guys in Greek mythology.
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