God of War: Chains of Olympus
A year ago, I was playing through God of War II on Playstation 2. Building on the already insanely great God of War, GoWII did everything right… unfortunately, that just didn’t seem like enough. With the 360 out and games looking and playing better than ever before, GoWII just felt a little dated.
Now, a year later, we’ve got God of War: Chains of Olympus on the PSP and guess what… it’s damn near portable gaming perfection… but somehow it just doesn’t seem like enough… again. Yes, the gameplay is tight. Yes the environments feel massive. And yes, the stakes seem high. But sometimes you get the feeling like the developers spent way more time on getting the game to look and play perfectly than they did on giving the player strong reasons to continue through the story.
It’s funny, but I noticed it more when playing through the second time around when I realized that there were 2 female gods I was dealing with (3 if you count Athena’s cameo), not just 1 two-faced female god.
Additionally, the admittedly cool piece at the end where you resign yourself to a life of war and suffering felt almost tacked on. Like the developers thought that they needed a big moment, but didn’t really know what they were going to do until the end… then went back into the story and sprinkled in the tiny bits of information that would lead up to this final moment.
Again, I should remember that this game is literally portable gaming perfection. It made the PSP do things I never knew it could… like get me to pick it up again.
Posted in gaming
February 13th, 2009 at 11:21 am
[...] I wasn’t 100% blown away by God of War II and Chains of Olympus left a little (I mean just a little) to be desired, but I’ll definitely remember that few [...]