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| The answer to this is No, btw by Rafiki 05/15/2022, 8:56pm PDT | ||||
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| God of War is a game about a man named Boy, because that's all he says, on an epic journey with his son Waypoint, because that's what he is, to scatter his wife's (and Waypoint's mother's) ashes, because righting wrongs or saving something is pretty played out. During this journey, Boy and Waypoint beat the shit out of Norse mythology and learn to understand each other and bond the way gamer dads never will with their own sons, because the sons of gamer dads will never not regard them as a bunch effete dorks.
The graphics, sound, and general presentation are 10/10. Looks and sounds spectacular, runs flawlessly, short load times. 10/10 AAA standards. The acting and the writing are.....pretty good! Like, actually good. They both have two of the worst possible things going for them, a prominent child role and video game writers, and they both manage to be shockingly good. The kid is 10/10 as far as child actors go, I don't think I ever wanted to punch him even once. The dialogue between Kratos and his son is surprisingly natural and believable, with the one exception of Kratos constantly overusing BOY. BOY. BOY. BOY BOY BOY BOY BOY BOY BOY BOY Jesus, just omit the word from time to time, we'll all understand who he's talking to, even the fucking boy. There's also some legitimately funny exchanges between the two, as well as with secondary characters who are also incredibly well-acted. The downside of the writing and acting don't have to do with the quality of it, but instead the programming of it. The kid gives callouts during combat, like telling you to watch out for an attack, commenting on health, or SCREAMING when you die, and it gets grating after you hear it for the millionth time. I wish there was an option to just turn down/off combat dialogue, instead of just a single slider for all dialogue. Compared to everything else, the actual game gets about a 7 out of 10. Except when flying enemies are around, then it's 1/10. The game combines God of War melee combat with a bit of Dark Souls, an open world, crafting, and the zoomed-in over-the-shoulder camera of Resident Evil 4-6, and everything combines to be a little bit worse than all of those games. The camera being so close is such a big issue that they added arrow indicators to let you know where off-screen enemies are and whether you're about to get hit with a melee attack or projectile, but even with these indicators it can still be overly frustrating to dodge attacks. This was an even bigger problem for me because I opted to play on Hard the first time through, and on that difficulty you die in about 2-3 hits, sometimes only 1. This could have probably been alleviated if they had just pulled the camera out further, but I have a feeling the reason they zoomed it in so close was just so that they could teleport Waypoint around without you noticing. See, there's a lot of interaction points that require Waypoint to be standing on a moving platform with you or to jump on your back. Even when you know he's a mile away, if you use one of those interaction points he'll instantly come trotting in next to you so you don't have to wait. If they pulled the camera back further, they couldn't play that trick and you'd have to stand around and wait longer. They probably made combat worse in order to make escorting better. :( The flying enemies are all universally terrible. The only way to kill them is with lock-on targeting but they all dart off screen so fast they disengage lock on, so you spend the entire fight whirling the camera around and constantly resetting the lock. The revenants have a homing attack that deals your entire health bar (on hard), and it will actually path around walls and corners to find you. Like any other game ever created, you can usually use walls and obstacles to block attacks that track your position, but these attacks have actual pathfinding so the result is that you'll run around to the other side of a wall to engage other enemies and then instantly die to an attack you weren't even aware was cast. Then your monitor will clap the sides of your head Three Stooges-style when you punch it so hard it snaps in half. Other than the core story bosses, the game has about 3 other bosses that it re-uses about 19 times each. That big giant wielding a stone the size of a sofa that you encounter right at the start of the game? Get ready to fight him in plain, red, blue, green, yellow, and purple. One thing that sort of bugged me was that the gore felt weirdly muted. It's not even that there's a lack of brutality. The weight of the attacks and the sound effects are there, there's severed limbs and bodies cleaved in half, but blood is just a quick puff and all of the animations seem to hurry past all of the finishers and reset the camera in a way that seems to want to paper over what just happened. It's like the game is afraid to revel in the fact you just grabbed a werewolf's lower jaw and ripped off the entire front half of its body. Here's a video to see what I mean. When I'm stomping somebody's head so hard it explodes, I expect more splattering and chunks sliding across the ground, more blood lust. There's talent trees to unlock all kinds of special attacks and abilities, but honestly, I just found the one or two combos I liked and spammed those for the entire game and activated the rage meter when it was full. Crafting is a chore. This game didn't need stats or craftable gear or WoW gear tiers. You can't craft half the shit anyways unless you do the sidequests. There's about 15-20 hours of sidequests, but they're unrelated to the story. They're mostly just filler to add lore, farm materials for crafting, and unlock achievements. There's also two challenge modes, one involving enemy gauntlets and another gathering points in some poison maze, but they were both terrible so I didn't bother. It's a fine action game. You'll probably like it, but it didn't deserve all of the HLGALUHLUGHULAHUGLAUHGU it was getting. Probably don't play it on hard like I did. |
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God Of War is a solid AAA title I'm sure but does it really deserve 10/10? NT by 04/25/2018, 9:20pm PDT  The answer to this is No, btw by 05/15/2022, 8:56pm PDT Rafiki reviews NT by 05/16/2022, 8:16am PDT Did you play on PS4 or Windows, Rafiki? by 05/16/2022, 8:35am PDT Windows by 05/16/2022, 11:30am PDT I am humbled by your continued partnership. Thank you. NT by 05/16/2022, 1:20pm PDT |
