[Pc Games]God of War Review: Trying to Grow Up

[Black CaT]

One of the reasons why it's worth following video games, even if you don't really play them much, is that there is no other medium so completely adolescent right now. Like a teenager, video games are grasping for maturity, sometimes reaching for the wrong things (grim severity, sex and violence) and occasionally stumbling upon profundity. Games are growing at a tremendous pace, not quite done cooking but still insisting that it is a complete adult medium worthy of respect. Video games have been around long enough to be right about some things and wrong about a lot of them, and when they try to reconcile the two, you get a game like God of War.

A sequel masquerading as a reboot, God of War plays coy with its history, taking place some indeterminate time after the trilogy kicked off by the 2005 game of the same name to tell the story of a broken man and his son on a journey to scatter the ashes of their deceased wife and mother.

While it doesn't require much knowledge of previous God of War games, it definitely leans on them for a lot of its dramatic weight. God of War wants you to think about the kind of game it used to be, because so much of it stems from the developers—many of which have worked on the series from very early on—are also thinking about it. The game is spare (maybe even too spare, which is something I never thought I'd say about a game) in telling you about your history, even as that history looms large over the game.

You are Kratos, a god from the world of Greek mythology living in self-imposed exile in a Nordic land with its own pantheon of gods from Norse mythology. Kratos quest with his son, Atreus, to perform a last rite for their loved one attracts the attention of these Norse gods, and things get complicated from there, with lots of monsters to fight.

 

That's how you're going to spend the bulk of God of War: fighting. It's an action game with some simple puzzles and optional exploration, but the thrill of the game is learning all the ways you can wreck face with your Leviathan axe, a frost-powered weapon that genuinely feels good to use every time. Combat in God of War is weighty and satisfying, with an array of skills and moves that, remarkably, make fights feel both complex and streamlined. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that you can throw your axe, and press a button solely dedicated to calling it back to you, Thor-style. Doing that never gets old.

But even the fighting feels like it's in conversation with the game's history. There's a raw brutality to the way Kratos swings his axe and tears mythic monsters to pieces with his bare hands, but it's a different sort from the kind of hyper-violence that Kratos inflicted in previous games.

"I want players to just go nuts and feel that sense of anger and chaos," said David Jaffe, creative director of the original 2005 God of War in a making-of documentary included on the Playstation 2 disc. That game was one whose design goals were largely dedicated to conveying a sense of brutal, cathartic, and unmitigated rage. God of War was a game about being pissed off, and how good it felt to let that rage go. Because God of War was fun. No action game before it had ever been so purposefully brutal, or astonishingly violent in the ways it let you rip your foes to shreds, wielding the hedonism and pettiness of Greek mythology like a cudgel with which it beat one of the purest power fantasies in modern gaming out of the Playstation 2. It was a revenge story in which Kratos, after pledging his life to Ares, the God of War, is tricked into murdering his family and vows to kill the god that set him on that path. Long story short, he does and becomes the God of War in Ares' stead. In subsequent games Kratos, unsatisfied by vengeance and power, would find reasons to murder the entire pantheon of Greek gods, ultimately ending in patricide as he finds out Zeus, the final target on his list, is his father. The trilogy ends with Kratos beating him to death with his bare hands.

Jaffe, an icon of dude-bro game design for his work on both God of War and his previous creation, Twisted Metal, left the series after the first game and has since faded from relevance. As the franchise continued and video games got older, that gratuitous violence began to show its age, particularly in God of War III, a mean game that tries to reckon with its loathsome protagonist by highlighting the player's complicity in Kratos's thirst for vengeance. (It doesn't really work.)

 

https://www.gq.com/story/god-of-war-review