Format: PS3 | Genre: Action adventure | Publisher: Sony | Developer: Santa Monica | Release date: 19/03/10 | RRP: £49.99

The final game in the God of War trilogy impressed us when we played a preview build last year. Now, Phill Cameron sits down with the release version, and comes away very interested indeed…

Better, stronger, faster, bigger, prettier, broader, cleverer, angrier, epic-er, muscley-er, stabby-er, brutal-er, err… what was I talking about again? Oh yes, God of War III. That’d be the one.

I’m confused by God of War III. I came to it expecting a (mostly) mindless hack-and-slash, featuring all sorts of brutal finishing moves and the angriest man alive in the most ridiculously epic situation there ever was, and I come away with questions of who the player is really playing in a third-person action game. It’s like they’re luring you in with the stabby stabby choppy choppy, and then bam! The wet fish of contemplation slaps you in the face.

I probably need to provide some context, otherwise you’re all going to think I’ve gone mental. Maybe I have. God of War III is everything I was expecting: you start the game on the back of the Titan Gaia, climbing mount Olympus to kill Zeus, because he stole your godly powers, and if there’s anything that makes Kratos angry (although in his case, everything makes him angry), stealing his power is going to get him pissed.

I’m not really sure if they could have given the game a more hilariously over-the-top opening. That you’re soon fighting huge water horse/crab things that seem to erupt from Poseidon’s… somewhere, while on Gaia’s arm, which is at least as wide as the M6, just exacerbates things. I mean, you’ve only been playing five minutes, and already you’re fighting a god that sits comfortably in the top three Greek gods ever? Shit is crazy.

NOT THE FACE
Shit gets crazier when you defeat him, though. God of War has always taken delight in its kills, showing in vivid detail the stabbings and punchings that Kratos doles out to those who serve as ambiguous targets for his revenge. But this is suddenly, strikingly different. You’re still pressing the buttons that make Kratos beat the living snot out of the Lord of the Sea, but you’re doing it through the eyes of Poseidon. As in, you press circle, and suddenly you’re punching yourself. You’re watching Kratos punch the screen, until finally he grabs Poseidon’s head, your head, and holds his thumbs over you. Press R2 and L2, the screen prompts. What, so that I can gouge my own eyes out? Are you mental?

But you do it. Of course you do it. You hold down the triggers, and the thumbs plunge into the screen, leaving you with blackness for a moment, just the blood-curdling scream of a god losing his sight and probably his mind, before you’re blissfully wrenched from that perspective and you get to watch Kratos hurl him off the cliff to his death.

And that’s just the first ten minutes. The game that follows has Kratos killing legendary, mythical figures left and right, cutting them down with just a sneer and a brutally efficient, if slightly excessive, amount of punching and stabbing. But that’s what Kratos does. That’s what you’re here for, right?

Developer Santa Monica have stated in the past that the God of War games are there to serve as a reason that the Greek pantheon died out, to be replaced by Roman and then eventually Christian belief systems. I can’t help but think that there’s another purpose behind the games: to create something almost comically violent, and then provide the player with a few moments of revelation; to hold up a mirror to allow them to see exactly how needlessly violent they’re being.

This is all done through almost painfully clever use of quick time events. You might see Heavy Rain as the game championing clever, context-sensitive use of controller prompts, but God of War III has it down to a fine art. When you’re performing a finishing move, the game relegates the button prompts to the sides of the screen, each corresponding to their location on the controller. Square lights up the left side of the screen, meaning that you can watch what’s actually going on, while just relying on your peripheral vision to inform you which button to press. [Continues]

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.