I passed by the Sony Entertainment booth at this years comic-con, where they had several test stations set up with the demo for the upcoming release, God of War III. I was fortunate enough to skip ahead and give it a try, despite the long lines they had throughout the day.
I had just finished playing through the first two God of War games, and I thought they were pretty fun. I mean, sure they were really cheesy but the senseless, excessive, ridiculous brutality is kinda funny. Not to mention the needless sex scenes. In either case, the stories aren’t excellent, but they are compelling enough, and learning even a little bit about Greek mythology while playing a video game is a good thing.
It is an action/adventure title just like the other two games in the series, the biggest difference is this one looks a lot better. Some of the monsters had some really good design, and the brutal kills on them looked better still.
Just like the second game you start out the demo with most of your powers from the last game, although they didn’t show any sign that they were going to take them away from you again. I can’t say for certain. What I can say for certain is that you mess Helios up with a ballista, then rip off his head and use it to light dark areas and illuminate secret walls. It was a good demo, and cheesy as ever.
They added a new weapon called the cestus. It was pretty much two steel gauntlets with a lion on the front. I thought the natural moves for this weapon were pretty cool, maybe better than any other sub weapon that they had in the other two games. Except for the fact that when you use the block attacks with them, they seem to do very similar moves to Athena’s blades block moves. This could easily be due to the fact that it’s an early demo.
The only other thing I can remotely complain about,\ was they added a new system to get across large chasms, where you have to grab harpies out of the sky, and jump to the next one. The controls for it are a little weird, and you die if you can’t do them right. I had the same problem with the Icarus wings, which are in this game as well. I guess I hate dying because I fell into a pit, because it’s so irredeemable. It’s just apart of the game though, almost like complaining about being destroyed in asteroids because the martian ship creamed you. It doesn’t come out until March 2010, so they have plenty of time to work out bugs and make improvements.
Seriously though, I know I say it a lot, but if you liked the other titles in the series there is no reason you shouldn’t look forward to this one, the demo was great, and I can’t wait to play the full game in March.