God of War: Ascension

This is a weird one. It's a half-hearted refresh for the franchise: updated mood, graphics, and gameplay. Hell, there's even online multiplayer, which I don't personally care about.

The mood doesn't feel quite like that of a God of War game. Greek mythology is moved into the background, as we're moved into a world of grotesque, surreal monsters and psychedelic encounters. These are not in themselves bad things, and they are well executed, but they are definitely unexpected. And "well-executed" does not mean great: the wacky monster designs are cool, but they have no stakes for the narrative. They're just window dressing. And it's honestly hard for me to say what the narrative even is. This is a big change from previous games, where the narrative tended to be brutally straightforward.

At least the graphics are amazing. Or are they really? Can the PS3 really achieve such detailed lighting, shadows, and textures? Actually, no, it can't. Any time the scene gets into some heavy GPU processing the FPS drops to frame-by-frame slow motion. This is visually jarring and of course affects input lag and combat. If this were a PC game, I would have reduced the quality settings to ensure an acceptable, stable framerate. PlayStation is already quite bad with a locked 30 FPS, half of what PC gamers would consider the bare minimum (PS4 Pro can go further on some titles, like the next God of War reboot). But, no can do here. We are stuck with this slowed-down garbage. Individual frames might be the most beautiful you have ever seen on the PS3, but the stuttering makes it a poor experience.

(Note that I am playing via PS Now, and I did ask myself if this stuttering was a PS Now problem. But I didn't have any problem like this with other PS3 games on PS Now, and the slowdowns were very clearly in graphic-intensive areas. So I'm thinking the game is just horribly optimized for its PS3 hardware target.)

A related issue: camera work. It was awful in God of War 1 and better in later games, but suddenly here they decided to rework it for drama. Let me tell you, even on my 100" projector screen I could barely see the tiny little pixels of Kratos fighting his enemies in some scenes. Dramatic, yes. Practical, no. I couldn't see what was going on so I just mashed buttons like crazy and hoped for the best. It didn't feel very satisfying.

The gameplay is different enough to warrant a few more related complaints. The controls don't always respond as expected, leading to frustrating combat. God of War is supposed to be about liquid-smooth action! And what's this about elemental magic? I could not understand what the differences were between fire, ice, and all the rest. In other words: magic, a fun part of previous games, was here neutered. And what happened to save points? Save is only automatic here, and that's not good. There was one place where I wanted to explore a puzzle area in order to get an achievement, but my save was far away. Every time I died I had to spend a minute running back to the puzzle. Dumb and annoying.

To be even more petty about gameplay: the combat combos have subtly changed. Actions that worked well against certain enemies in previous games are here useless against the same enemies. It's like a weird alternative gameplay reality. This is annoying because after playing previous games my hard-won skills were tossed aside. Combat is quite challenging—this is a difficult game—and though it can be rewarding (when the the controls are not against you) it just isn't quite God of War as we've known it.

Final complaint: The Trials of Archimedes. This is the most difficult and frustrating level (so far) in the game series' history. It's a sequence of very hard combat scenes with no save or healing between them. Honestly, it took me a month to get through it. I would give it a try for an hour, get frustrated, and leave the game for a week. Only to come back and fail again. Things are smooth once you get through this level, but boy did it test my resolve and detract from an already problematic game.