Hands-on | God of War III

Format: PS3 | Genre: Action adventure | Publisher: Sony | Developer: SCE Studios | ETA: March 2010

By Lewis Denby

I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching God of War III.

I do mean just watching, too.  Over the past couple of days, this is the game to have drawn in the crowds.  Its booth is regularly the busiest here at the Eurogamer Expo, with excited hordes gathering gleefully around the eight enormous screens.  There’s a reason for that, and you don’t even have to actually play it to understand that.

You want evidence?  Okay.  How about the scene where Kratos grabs Helois, wrestles him to the ground, then slowly rips off his head, with agonising screams and tremendous amounts of spraying blood?  Just minutes earlier, Kratos had gouged out another character’s eyes.  And earlier still, an enormous, fiery beast towered over a gargantuan courtyard, thumping and stomping around in the distance, before raising a bloody huge foot and clambering up in chase of the player.  One of his toes is roughly the same size as Kratos.

The God of War series has always been spectacular, in the most literal sense of the word.  But even with that knowledge, even with the reasonable assumption of a glistening cinematic experience… my goodness, God of War III looks impressive.

//Blood soaked
It’s one of the most ludicrously vicious games I’ve ever seen.  It’s fearlessly gruesome.  It’s soaked in blood and relishes in the breaking of bones.  It’s the sort of game that makes the Australian authorities scamper for the big, red censorship button.  And it’s absolutely brilliant.

To think that this is several months away from release is astonishing – the level of polish is already staggeringly high.  Each animation is inch-perfect, the visual detail flawless, the audio brutal and boomy.  Every single cinematic sequence flows seamlessly from the gameplay, rarely taking away control from the player and always, always impressive to a ludicrous degree.

Indeed, God of War III is a big fan of keeping you in-game.  The gorgeously rendered menu screen for the version we played features Kratos’ head, filling the majority of the television.  Starting a new game doesn’t switch you to a loading screen.  The camera simply zooms out, then pans around the scene before settling neatly into a third-person viewpoint.  That gorgeously rendered menu screen was in-game.  In-bloody-game.

The camera itself is a highlight.  It’s bewilderingly dynamic, flying around at all angles, but never once does it frustrate.  Far from it – it swings and zooms beautifully to create a perfect filmic quality while never, ever focusing on anything other than the action.  It is always in the right place.  It’s about as good as an in-game camera has ever been.

//Quick as a flash
It’s probably fairly evident that I’m rather enamoured by what I’ve seen of God of War III.  Do I have any concerns?  Well, not huge ones.  Some of the action is slightly fiddly, the on-screen tutorial tips occasionally too thin.  The odd sequence or combination of buttons feels slightly unintuitive.  But then, this is the sort of thing that could prove to be vastly better in the context of the full game.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though perhaps inevitible, is the game’s reliance on quick-time events.  It uses them to contribute to the oh-so-wonderful cinematic experience, and it’s difficult to think of a way such sequences could be approached differently, but the frequency with which they appear is slightly annoying.  There’s something about the inability to actually, properly perform the spectacular action sequences that grates, just ever so slightly – particularly when the more hands-on, chain-swinging action feels so smooth, so joyously horrible, and so breathtakingly chunky.

But when you’re flying through a tunnel, dodging huge, flaming balls of molten rock… or when the camera swings around to reveal a vast, open, astonishingly beautiful courtyard, before zooming right in to showcase the frankly silly amount of detail on the surface of a rock… or when that head rips off, agonisingly slowly, gruesomely convincing in its animation… that’s God of War III.  And if that’s still God of War III come March of next year, it could be a very special game indeed.