To the depths of Hades and back

God of War.

The very name echos among the Playstation brand enthusiasts, marketing gurus, and video game fans everywhere.

The first god of war was released on the PS2 in 2005, many, many years before I became a multi platform gamer, and like so many Sony games at the time, I missed out on it. I would like to say that it's a game that I always planned on going back to, that it sat on my "pile of shame", waiting to be experienced, but the truth is, the extremely limited experience I had with the Playstation 2 at the time was enough to keep me loyal to Microsoft and Nintendo.

Fast forward 4 years, and a few consoles later, the god of war collection is released, featuring both God of War, AND God of War 2, as well as some bonus features that I could not care less about. Naturally, it piqued my curiosity, and during a small sale at Toys R Us, I grabbed a copy for $29.99.

As part of my new years resolutions, I'm endeavoring to finish no less than one game a month that I own and have never played. Because this collection is massive, I utilize a random chooser to help me find a game to play, free of bias and personal choice. God of war was the first, so I dived in to it on New Years Eve, and tearing through it.

I'm not going to bother reviewing a game that was released 5 years ago, but I would like to share a few thoughts on the game.

Overall, I'm impressed with the whole experience. It's an older, last generation game, so naturally the graphics are below current standards, even though the box art boasts "Remastered in High Definition", but it is at least comparable to low budget, current gen games.

Graphics aside, the game play is fairly standard, similar to every "god of war clone" that has come out in the last five years, as well as dozens of hack and slash games that have come before it.

What really sells the game for me, aside from the wonderful greek mythology that it oozes from its pores is the way the game presents itself to you. There is little in the way of tutorials, at least in the sense that we have come to know them now. Occasionally a scroll will pop up explaining how to do a light and heavy attack, or how to grab onto a rope and swing around, but other than that, the game expects that you've played games before, and know how to figure things out.

This figure it out attitude carries over to level exploration and puzzle solving as well, which is both its strength and (in my eyes) weakness. Video games of this generation very rarely deviate from either a strict linear path, or a devout non linear path, but GoW manages to somehow do both. In several of the games areas I was presented with branching paths, with no clear indication of which was the right way to go. Several times even the wrong path yielded action and rewards, and usually deposited me back close to where I started anyways. The right path would then of course become clear, but very rarely did I feel that i had wasted time in going the way I did.

Puzzles are also very similar, in that the game does not make it explicitly clear on what it expects you to do, but the puzzles are also just simple enough that a non puzzle minded gamer like myself was able to figure them out, subsequently boosting my self esteem. There was one particular puzzle that I thought clever and devious, so much so that I was assuring myself that this was a "secret" area, a special reward for my forward thinking. It wasn't until I had returned to the branching path that took me here that I realized that this was in fact, the specific path I was meant to take in order to progress the level.

Huh. Not as smart as I gave myself credit for.

A few of the puzzles were a bit too much for me, but I blame my personal failings on that, and aside from that, the only real complaints I had about the game involve some very specific platforming areas, and one particular section in which I was pushing a cage up a hill.

There have been many games that have been lauded by critics and laymen alike, and often times I shake my head in amazement, because I fail to see what they see. Halo, Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto 3, and more, are all good games, but none of them changed the way I look at gaming in any significant way, but after playing the first GoW, I can truly understand why it was such a huge deal.