god of war (2018) - dnf
genuinely everything wrong with modern gaming, especially sony's output, and i'm not kidding
please note: this is a game i have reviewed multiple times! the prior versions of this review will be included below. enjoy!
tl;dr: the prior games' interest in being both amazingly frenetic combo-heavy spectacle fighters, as well as their plots, are nothing but faint memories when playing this game. everybody who works at sony or a sony subsidiary hates video games and wants to make movies but begrudgingly have to staple an interactive element on to it so they make it the most mindless bullshit ever. i have had enough of that, to a point of exhaustion. i am abandoning this game as a result of it, with no intention to further engage with it as each time i do i am met with only a hollow soul to show for it.
i just can't fucking do it. i have tried again and again. i dont want or need to see any further.
it has been an increasingly interesting point to me over the years to pose the question, "does a game have to be fun?", which itself is aligned with the equally intriguing question of "should the value of art be directly correlated to its ability to adhere to the conventions of its most widespread examples?". i like the idea of things that exist outside of a larger cultural norm, to be these hyper-specific experiences, crafted out of an idea and a passion, to communicate a specific scenario. that applies across film, literature, painting, and likewise, most pertinent to this discussion, games.
however, what i do not like and cannot stomach any more of in my life are things that fly so far to the other end of the spectrum. things that see fit to do nothing but languish in pre-established, safe conventions, set as a sandbox by years of oversaturation of those elements by other progenitors in the medium, all the while disregarding and disavowing its own history in favor of attempting to find a new, namely generalized and large, audience. a thing so addicted to appealing to the masses that it loses identity as it scrambles to check all the boxes to make it a "compelling" title to as many people willing to part with their money as possible. no interest in being an evolution to what came before, merely imitating and emulating it in a desperate bid to get your attention and your cash.
a thing so deeply addicted to being nothing more than a product to be consumed, rather than art to be enjoyed in the context of its own medium, whilst desperately attempting to beg to be part of another medium because it so desperately wants the acclaim associated with it.
on a story and gameplay level alike, this game stands in bold opposition to the rest of this series.
gameplay in prior god of war games was renowned for its combos, for its speed, for your ability to go from attack to attack in a flowing string once you had attained mastery, whilst still feeling buttery smooth enough to the newcomer to engage you a sufficient amount to invite that mastery, across many varied locales, broken up with cutscenes between the stages. this game instead decides that the best course of action is to simply intrude on your gameplay for cutscenes instead. unskippable, long, meandering and just dull cutscenes that are filled with dialogue running the gamut from redundant to obnoxious. that said, the gameplay isn't much better itself; a slow, slogging excuse for "combat" that will feel right at home for anybody who has played the last of us with melee weapons. the weight is earned in that game's case, as it is a punctuation to the brutality being exerted by a human man against other humans, which is supposed to add to the literal and figurative weight of said actions; here, i am merely being bored to tears with the fact that "kratos" swings his axe with the efficiency of a shot snail. what possible reason could there be for the, i don't know, GOD OF WAR to be this fucking pitiful? clearly not his age, seeing as he is fully capable of doing shit that young kratos could do - oh, wait, just in cutscenes, though, wouldn't want to give you too many options to make the combat too fun! you want fun, just explore our barren open world with the dogshit boat controls and go find some side content to make your needlessly implemented RPG stats go up like you're playing destiny! what's that? you're bored of the same three main enemy types and the same one miniboss being all the game has to offer? oh, well, don't worry, we've got some of the most banal boss fights you can imagine with none of the sauce or scale of the prior games. great, right? can't you tell that its cool, man? look at the graphics of it! look at how cool our texturework is! look at how desperately we are hoping that our hyper-realism graphics make up for the lack of actually interesting enemies and environments from every prior game, and please nod because you think that technological superiority must mean its outright better!
and for the other side of that coin, this story is truly ass as somebody who loves the plots of the old god of war games, and it is not for lack of trying to understand it. i like the idea of kratos having to start fresh in a new realm because he God Of War III'd all over the place last time and his subsequent struggles. what i don't understand is why he would reject literally every bit of growth he had in those prior games, where he grappled with survivors guilt, where he grappled with the images of his dead child, wife and brother in his head for years, where he spent a not-insignificant chunk of last game learning that his family had scarred him, as he deeply believed another god looked like his daughter and a great deal was made of it. you know, as closure to the fact that he was scarred from it all, hence the whole fucking tragedy of his character, his whole motivation, his whole driving force! how his selfishness, his lust, his violent bloodlusting rampages, were born of an anger that he could not excise from himself - god of war III ending with the symbolic destruction of the pantheon, but more crucially, a misguided sacrifice that he thought was to put things right, by releasing hope to humanity and stabbing the blade of olympus through himself in an attempt to do so, likely also a mirror to his initial suicide attempt in god of war 1, now done out of some perverted sense of justice rather than a lack of hope; he perceived his own hopelessness in this situation being able to give back to the hope of humanity, he was making some attempt to atone or redeem himself in that moment, whilst simultaneously being able to say "fuck you" to the gods one last time.
meanwhile, in this, he's just knocking about with a new family. that itself stands in stark contrast to what i would have expected out of kratos by this stage - namely, uh, nothing, frankly. i personally, at this point, believe that i would have preferred no sequel to god of war III because whatever the fuck this is sure as shit is not kratos. sure, he's strong, and sure, he's done some shit, but this is not the goddamned ghost of sparta. not to me. just about everything he does in this game, every step of the way, feels obscenely out of character to me; not in a way that he has grown or changed naturally, like with a character arc or anything, but that he has just randomly snapped off-screen into being capable of ambivalence to most things rather than opposition. if you had shown it, maybe it would have clicked more? but as it stands, it feels like you wanted to make a story about a guy who had a fucked up past, knew that wasn't going to sell because you were literally just making fantasy last of us plot-wise, and so pivoted to making a god of war "sequel", complete with at that point industry-standard child companion and needless parent-child bonding sequences. removed from being god of war, this is truly less than nothing. this is like, godfall tier bullshit, but being bigged up because... reasons.
is it something that im just not seeing? is it something that is just incompatible with my interpretation of events and character, here?
and yet, the only reason i am writing this, my third lot of thoughts on this game, is to excise any last remaining investment that i have with it.
i am finished. i have tried to meet this game on its level for so fucking long. a year of stop-and-start playthroughs, different difficulties chosen to make it feel better or more difficult or like anything, and it's just nothing. its all just fucking nothing. i feel a malaise of pure indifference wash over me when i play this game now, where i am so numb to anything that its putting down because it already established out of the gate that it was putting its worst foot forward and it just keeps going down, but there's no surprise in that. i'm not even getting a nice big "ooh, i can't wait to write about this and deconstruct precisely what i dislike" mindset from it anymore. just "ok" and nothing more.
i cannot go forward with this game as it is draining to a degree that i can formulate no further thoughts whilst playing it. it is a video game equivalent to the orb of confusion from spongebob. i can't even rate it; to do so would be a disservice to the games that i genuinely can write 0.5/1 star reviews about for legitimate reasons that i can articulate and point to as damning faults. this is just grey paste.
and just whilst i've got you, remember that this game, this highly-derivative over-the-shoulder snoozefest of a generic story, won game of the year 2018 over such games as red dead redemption 2, celeste, monster hunter world, super smash bros ultimate, kingdom come deliverance, vermintide 2, dragon quest xi and judgment.
mainstream gaming outlets and critical voices are not concerned with the medium of video games; they are concerned with how well they can fit in amidst the more "conventionally accepted" mediums so they can feel validated. this game and its subsequent acclaim, considering the other releases that year, are testament to that being the case.
god of war is made in contempt of its peers, its predecessors, and itself. the epitome of both reboot-slop and sony-slop
this is a game confused about what it is and what it wants to be so frequently. does it want to be the typical last of us big lad-small thing bonding story that sony themselves had oversaturated by this stage? does it want to be a fantasy open world game with needlyly skinnerbox-style "rpg stats" (where, in reality, there exists no role being played other than that of an accountant with all the number crunching), made to death and hopefully swiftly marching towards it, too? does it want to be a heavy, weighted brawler, with each swing feeling like you're dragging yourself through molasses with your axe, or like you're equipped with the finest feather dusters with your fists? does it want to be an insufferable buddy-journey film with constant whedon-tier dialogue, delivered through increasingly annoying mouthpieces as time goes on?
most damning of all, amongst all of these things that it's so often torn between being, it seldom remembers at any point during the shuffle to remember what it should be: a god of war game.
this is a fucking joke to me. slow, plodding combat that consistently feels grossly underwhelming, even if you can have the stars align to allow you to get off any combos. trite, "emotional" story about kratos deciding that actually i learned nothing and going on to have and therefore immediately endanger another family in another realm because why not, and the struggles of him being a dad, which means get ready to see 17 different fucking cutscenes where he shakily raises his hand ready to place it on his kids shoulder only to turn away like No... I'm Not Ready but LITERALLY the SECOND FUCKING TIME is IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED by him COMFORTING ATREUS with the HAND ON THE SHOULDER! so WHY THE FUCK do we do this in another FUCKTON of CUTSCENES?? what, were you guys falling asleep choreographing this bullshit and you forgot where you were? can't say i would fucking blame you given how entirely paint-by-numbers this plot is, and as opposed to older god of war games that largely mercifully remembered after god of war 1 that skip buttons exist and consequently didn't put as much focus into their stories - even if they were stellar, shit, interstellar in comparison to this shite - no, you're gonna sit down and watch every single fucking snail-paced cutscene of nothing happening for 98% of the story. and the other 2% wonder why we aren't playing what are inarguably the best action sequences in the game, which then makes you remember:
this is yet another sony game designed by committee to be yet another skin on a plot basis that doesn't make sense for this character's past, and will hide behind the excuse of "oh it's all so cinematic" to ignore its utterly fucking glacial pace, sleep-inducing railroading, precisely zero depth combat and, ironically, god-awful character writing. it is insanity to me that you even offer an auto-sprint feature in a game that, quite seriously nine times out of ten, does not allow you to sprint in the times where you want it most; for example, being bored to tears by the exposition-dump cutscenes and wanting to just move on and do anything else, like getting back to the stiff, shit combat because it's at least better than the stiff, shit dialogue.
i suppose that i should say that there were points throughout where i felt maternal towards atreus, but that is also because i form emotional connections with ladybugs that land on my monitor. similarly, though, the connection is fleeting, severed by the mere passage of time as i go on with other memories.
this game is the equivalent of a bag of chips where every other chip is one of them overly spikey ones that hurts your throat; it'll put me in pain in the moment and i'll call for the death of the manufacturer, but if i do literally anything else more captivating with my time (see: quite literally anything else) all of the situational anguish washes away as though it had never existed in the first place.
this game is single-handedly able to support the narrative that games writing is bad down to how many people will blindly suck it off with seemingly no awareness of just how overdone literally element of it is, and unlike some, there's not an actually fun gameplay loop to fall back on, but rather an equally slow and boring waste of time.
i might play ragnarok at some stage to see if it's any better. i wouldn't hold my breath.
i started a new playthrough after having been unable to progress on give me god of war, opting for give me a challenge. this proved to make the game toothless, on top of the fact that after having to recede from a save file that was about 3 or 4 hours in (admittedly, one that i had started a year ago, hence me wanting to just start a new file), only to see that i was fighting the exact same enemies and then had to face the exact same mini-boss that i had just been fighting in a far later part of the game, at the start? nah, i think im good. i tried you out again, but youre going back on the shelf. glad that some people like it but this most certainly is not god of war to me, at least not yet. maybe i'll come back eventually but this is just monotonous, slow slogging combat being paid off with the most trite sony cinema-slop cutscenes as were the style at the time that, for my money, seem to directly go against every bit of character progression kratos had in the prior games. i dont want to make that statement with such authority, as that may change later on in the game, and that's why im giving no star rating to this as i do want to at some point play this and compose my thoughts, but... jesus, i just have no drive whatsoever. i really dont give a shit about last of us-esque railroading and bonding sequences into plodding gameplay that just does not evoke any sort of the enjoyment i got out of the originals.
