God of War for PlayStation 2

One of the plusses of finally breaking my World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI addictions is that I now have time to actually play games outside of MMOs. This means I can at least pretend I'm going to start making a dent in my gigantic backlog of unopened games (seriously-I've got probably 200 games in shrink wrap...). I've already finished several games over the course of the last month-feels good. I'll never really get caught up (not with all of the new stuff coming out adding to the mountain of "games to play"), but sometimes the illusion of progress is better than nothing.

Today we'll be taking a look back at the PlayStation 2 mega hit, God of War. I've played a bit of God of War back when it came out a few years ago, but I've only recently gotten around to finishing it. Generally speaking, I see why everyone gushed about Kratos' first adventure (and why it's about to spawn its second sequel), but I don't know that I find it as perfect as so many other people have. God of War is a great game, but it's also a superb example of why it's important to play through an entire title before writing the review. What starts out as one of the most satisfying action romps I've ever experienced runs out of gas a few hours later-and essentially limps to the finish line.

To be fair, in the years since God of War debuted, we've all learned a lot about the "why" of GoW's rather underwhelming second half. David Jaffe and crew were up against the wall as far as time was concerned and concessions had to be made to get the game to retail in the timeframe they'd promised. That's a harsh reality tied to the business of gaming-and while I feel for Jaffe and his team, it doesn't excuse the fact that the latter stages of GoW feel oddly incongruous (and incredibly unsatisfying) when placed next to what came before.

Before we get to that, let's talk about what makes God of War so cool.

Players take control of Kratos, a Spartan warrior who everyone despises. As the game opens, Kratos is haunted by nightmares of all the horrible things he's done in his past. Unable to free himself from his memories, he throws himself off a cliff toward the jagged rocks far below. The rest of the game (well almost all of it) then takes place before this event-allowing players to experience firsthand how Kratos arrived at this desperate moment.

For the first four or five hours (out of the eight it took me to complete the game), it's an incredibly satisfying journey. The game starts off strong, forcing Kratos into a confrontation with the Hydra of mythology that's so well conceived and so much fun to control that I was ready to tell anyone who'd listen that this game was the greatest thing since porn. That opening stage and boss encounter highlights everything that's so great about God of War-Kratos feels like a total killing machine (and his moveset and controls are so responsive that maneuvering him around the game world felt incredibly natural. There's no real learning curve to God of War-there's just the matter of finding and refining your own combat style to the point where Kratos becomes the literal embodiment of death). The game moves along from there in a similar fashion. There's never a moment that's quite as transcendently cool as that opening boss fight (which kept bringing to mind Wes Craven's film Scream-Craven set the bar so high with the opening murder of that film that we all sat on the edge of our seat the rest of the way through-even though nothing he did after that could ever rise above the bar he set in the first fifteen minutes), but it's engaging and a lot of fun.

The reason it's so fun is because the game understands the concept of scope. God of War is a title that operates on a grand scale. There's nothing small about the experience. Kratos is larger than life. The ancient environments are breathtaking in their presentation (even now-which is more impressive considering everyone's used to games on the more technologically advanced PS3 and Xbox 360). There are moments in God of War where'd I simply stop and gawk in awe at what Jaffe and his team had come up with (and also at what they managed to wring out of the PS2 hardware)-watching a giant wandering the desert for eternity with a gigantic temple strapped to his back is just one of the many amazing visuals the game presents to its audience. The combat is equally as grand and breathtaking-it's not enough to kill things with Kratos' blades (given to him by Ares, chained forever to his wrists), you kill things in the most violent and over the top ways imaginable. Hell, even the game's score is majestic. The music soars at certain stages and I kept thinking "maybe they got John Williams to compose this thing...". Everything in God of War's first half is about being big and breathtaking and in your face. It's an amazing accomplishment.

Unfortunately, right after you see that awesome giant in the desert, the game shifts gears. The second half of the game finds Kratos dispatched to recover Pandora's Box-a mission that requires him to enter the giant temple and make his way to the prize hidden inside. When this happens, the game switches from being a grand, wide-open, butt-kicking good time to a much more traditional dungeon romp-with combat replaced by some very dodgy platforming and bland puzzle solving sequences. Pandora's Temple treats everything that made God of War so memorable up til that point as an afterthought and replaces the bulk of it with generic 3D action game mechanics that seem completely in opposition to what came before. Kratos is a man of action-why would he want to spend time solving a bunch of stupid puzzles that require flipping switches, moving things around (seriously, there's a Tetris-esque puzzle late in the temple that is the epitome of awful) and swimming? What little combat there is suffers as well because the enemies are run of the mill monsters and not the grand scale bosses I'd become accustomed to fighting.

Even worse is the stage leading to the last boss. Kratos takes a trip to Hades late in the game, which seems like a fantastic opportunity to let him beat the snot out of a whole lot of monsters who call the underworld home. That doesn't happen-instead, players get to traverse an entire area filled with platforms to jump on and rotating logs and pillars to traverse (each fitted with blades)-oh, and missing a jump or falling off the log is an instant death. It's terrible-and I understand that the game had to be finished and this was the best they could put in given the time they had left, but that doesn't make it any easier to accept. God of War limps across the finish line by forcing players to endure a lengthy (and boring) temple and then adds insult to injury by adding awkward platforming complemented with cheap death. Everyone says first impressions are important, but this last impression of the game figures to color my perception of God of War from this point forward.

Despite the flaws, the game is still loads of fun (at least in the first half). Sure, the second portion drops the ball in some significant ways, but by the time you get there you're already so swept up in the grandness of the experience, the fun of the combat, and coolness of antihero Kratos that even the shoddy last acts can't ruin the experience. It's easy to see why the game garnered so much praise upon its release-because even now, several years later, it's still a fine title. With another couple of months to develop GoW, we might have had a perfect action game experience. It didn't happen that way, though, so instead God of War has to settle for being very good instead.