God of War 2 - First Play - 3 Hours In

In the last few weeks, as I consumed every inch of copy having anything to do with God of War 2, I barely took time to recall how little time I’d spent with God of War 1. Pale people-as-self-righteous-Mediterraneans is a great conversation piece. Sex, politics, emotional toddlers, lots of steel, plenty of skin. But in practice, I think most of us have been burned more than we’ve been pleased: “Alexander,” “Troy,” “Batttle of Olympus” on the NES?  But there I was, day one in Circuit City with a cashier shooting me a disapproving look when I said that I did indeed want that free promotional T-shirt.
 
If you too have been following the press, you’ve probably seen a lot of this game in action already. But it makes all the difference to have it in your hands. Yep, the game is heavily scripted and full of crowd-pleasing surprises. I was grinning, and maybe I even let out a few yelps of surprise, when the roller coaster’s brakes gave and sent me down another white-knuckle plunge. It may be that I haven’t held the dual shock for a while, but my hands were full of knots the morning after the first play. The pacing isn’t only intense; it’s also often clever. Sometimes something as simple as the set camera shifting 60 degrees is enough to change everything. You don’t have any direct control over where you’ll be hacking and slashing next, but if you see it in the distance and think, “I wonder what it looks like over there,” chances are that’s where you’ll be next. These changes of scenery are often exhilarating, and always gratifying.
 
Director Cory Barlog is a gamer’s director. He’s got a very direct sense of what has and hasn’t been done before, and he plays it safe as much as he pushes boundaries. If you asked a regular guy on the street what video games look like, the image he’d conjure up would probably look a lot like God of War. There are a lot of enemies, and the slightest poke spills gallons of their blood.  And while there’s quite a few buttons to destroy them with, they’ll all usually just whip out a yellow laser (they’re blades connected to chains, right?). And they’re mindless. You’ll watch them run off cliffs full bore a few times. But the boss fights and set pieces are the real bread and butter of the game play. And that’s where you get a full sense of why the game asks you to regularly use six combat buttons.
 
All that said, the game is extremely daft. Yeah, I know this is Greek mythology, and Greek mythology is classic by definition. But the game insists on doing everything on such a huge scale, that it pretty much stomps all over the nuance and humanity in those well-tread tales about the gods. Even Goya’s Cronus  is easier to swallow (pun intended!) than Barlog’s retelling. Kratos’ dialogue is just as wince inducing as King Leonidas in the “300″ trailers. It’s no coincidence that they’re both Spartans. But did they both have to be so ruthlessly dull? Then again, those who actually finished the original game probably have all sorts of elucidating exposition that would change my mind.
 
I should probably just start taking these things at face value. That is to say, it’s a marginally fun game that asks nothing of the player but a little perseverance and a lot of twitch. In that capacity, my first three hours dragging Kratos around the battlefield were consistently awe-inspiring and entirely empty.