There's no other way to say it, so I'll just be blunt: God of War is not a good game. It starts off well, with a first level that is quite memorable and gets the player's attention in a big way. Unfortunately, the game pretty much peaks a little bit before the halfway point -- from there it gets really old really fast. You fight the same repetitive variations of the game's three or four base enemy types a bajillion times, with some areas that feature nearly infinite respawning. The last few levels of the game, instead of featuring intuitive and challenging puzzles, regress into mere exercises in "thinking like the developers," often requiring highly arbitrary "objectives" in order to pass to the next area. (These objectives are often something like clearing a level of every enemy, as well as the hundred times each one respawns.)
There are definitely several things in the game that seem really cool at first glance, but upon closer inspection simply don't make much logical sense. For example, in Poseidon's "challenge" in Pandora's Temple, a generic god that claims to be Poseidon requires the "ultimate sacrifice" of a human life in exchange for passage. Putting aside the fact that for Kratos -- little more than a soulless killing machine of the gods -- taking a single human life is not even close to a meaningful sacrifice, it is hard to explain just why exactly there were a dozen or so Greeks hanging in cages in the room immediately before. How did they get there if it was supposedly so difficult to get into the temple in the first place? They are rather conveniently just there so that Kratos can sacrifice them. Furthermore, why is the brilliant Rob Paulsen (Morte from Planescape: Torment and Raphael from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among other roles) so criminally underutilized in such a meaningless role as the voice of this arbitrarily-placed sacrificial sod?
Speaking of meaningless, what was the point of utilizing Greek mythology if it was only going to be used in name only for such a lacking, generic story? Call me crazy (and numerous rabid God of War fan legions most certainly will), but does merely using some very basic names and titles of certain Greek gods and monsters actually count as being based upon Greek mythology? Pretty much every Western work of literature could be considered to be based upon Greek myth in that case. Just because there are characters called Ares and Zeus, and just because there are monsters that only in the most liberal sense resemble the minotaur and Medusa, does not mean that the game is based on Greek mythology. To be fair, though, the tone -- bloodthirsty amorality and childish, vengeful deities -- is pretty well done.
The game's art direction is certainly of a high caliber. If nothing else, the game features beautiful character and location designs that are excellently presented in what is one of the best looking games for the PlayStation 2. The characters remind me a lot of Gerald Brom's work for the Dark Sun campaign setting, and some of the areas -- such as the Hydra's sea, the game's first level -- are pretty breathtaking.
Unfortunately, a lot of those areas -- especially Hades, as its name might imply -- are nightmarish for all the wrong reasons. There are numerous parts that are various combinations of ridiculous, cheap, and ridiculously cheap, such as Hades's eternal spinning column of pointy things. Such areas feel unfair and designed for no other purpose than to look cool and to brutally frustrate the player. Combine this propensity for insta-kill areas with a horribly static camera and the "point-o'-one-thousand-respawns" in every other room, and you've got a recipe for terrible.
Again, most of these problems are in the latter half to two-thirds of the game. The first few levels are brilliantly done, albeit with an ulterior motive, I fear: addiction. Like a crack dealer giving a free hit in order to get his client hopelessly hooked, God of War tries to hook players with a heavily appealing intro -- I still feel that the opening level is one of the better lead-ins to a game in a long while -- before devolving into base crap.
If only God of War could maintain its momentum for the entirety of the experience -- as well as lose the shoddy, half-assed Greek mythology angle -- it'd be a hell of a game, and perhaps even the game that it was hyped up to be. Instead, it's a terrible letdown that comes nowhere near that level of alleged greatness, and easily stands as perhaps the most overhyped and overrated game of the past decade.
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