This is obviously a game for a particular demographic, which is somewhat refreshing to see. There's nothing quite so satisfying in video games as ripping open an elephant-headed ogre's head and pulling his brains out. Giant centaurs, elephant-headed ogres, flying harpies, snake-like Nagas – all of them eventually falling prey to Kratos' flailing Blades of Chaos. Combat is fast and fluid and the finishing moves are hilariously nasty in their garishness. Like I said, it's epically epic, awe-inspiring stuff.Īlong the way, there are plenty of mythology-inspired creatures to dispatch in the trademark shockingly bloody manner. Undaunted, Kratos jumps and climbs along its huge rib cage, and rides flaming elevators up its torso. By my guess, the sun god's statue dwarfs Lady Liberty at least a hundred times over. To get to the Oracle of Delphi, for example, Kratos must activate and ride on the back of giant mechanical snakes, which twist and turn around an enormous pillar that extends a bridge to the temple.įurther along, he must rebuild a giant, Statue-of-Liberty-like monument to Apollo, then relight its lantern. If we come to play Kratos for spectacle we stay for the gore.Īscension has all the epic stage setting of the earlier games, starting with giant, sweeping vistas and mammoth monsters and machines plodding around in the background. Luckily, story has never been God of War's attraction and the game can survive a plot as nonsensical as Greek mythology itself. So, if Kratos ends up killing the Furies, how will the subsequent three games even be possible? Can the gods continue on without the fates to watch over them? And how does one go about defeating supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing beings? If only they could somehow foresee that the Spartan is not to be trifled with. It seems the sisters are all twisted because our hero has betrayed his oath to Ares. In Ascension, which takes place some years before the first game, Kratos must deal with an even more powerful force than Ares or Zeus – the three Furies, who govern the fate of all gods and mortals. The manipulative Athena decided to harness that bad blood to further her own vendetta. Ares had given Kratos great power in exchange for serving him, but he also tricked the Spartan general into killing his own family. In the first God of War (2005), Athena recruited Kratos to kill Ares, the titular deity. It's hard to escalate things when a story has run its course so the developers at Santa Monica Studio did the only sensible thing: they went for the prequel. When last we saw our protagonist Kratos in God of War III, the grunting, pale-skinned, chain-sword-wielding Spartan was putting an end to the reign of the gods by chopping Zeus himself into pieces. Whether you enjoy more of the same in this latest instalment depends on whether or not you're tired of that premise. It's the same thing we've seen over three core games in the franchise so far: gory hack-and-slash action set in the, literally, epic world of the Greek pantheon. Any time a game publisher puts out a sequel that's a lot like the last one, they're tempting fate – will people buy it because they want more of what they know, or will they give it a pass for that very reason? God of War: Ascension is the perfect example of game that has to answer that question.
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