That game was so boring. It was a cinematic showcase but being praised as it was made me really question where games are headed.
Full rant if anyone cares:
The game starts becoming a button masher. On normal it isn’t difficult and on hard the enemies health bars are so big that you just sit there tapping attack for twenty minutes on every encounter. So I also gave up.
Games just need to have ridiculously long tutorial areas where they drip feed players systems that are so generic an oaf could figure them out. I guess devs get some data back that tells them certain features aren’t used so they came to the conclusion that the players must not understand them.
Rather than admit that those systems are boring and never matter to the game, they instead feel the need to let the player slowly use and discover each system over the course of ten hours. The game has you fight a boss fight with one combo move. It’s at least an hour before you head up the mountain. By this point the only storytelling that has happened is that you have to get the ashes to the top of the mountain. Then you unlock the ability to upgrade stuff. And you keep going up the mountain. At least three hours in you’ve no doubt watched about 1 1/2 hours of scripted cutscenes. At the point in the story where you meet the annoying as shop keeper you still don’t know what is going. Why you are doing what you are doing, or even know who attacked you or why. They bring up Thor and Oden and expect you to know who they are.
You fight a dragon in one of the worst scripted elevator sequences ever. Then you fight him for real. At this point they introduced the bombs. Five hours in. You as the player is still not sure why anything is happening. You have to believe that this woman who’ve you’ve never met meant something to this kid and man who you’ve also never met before. Just take their word for it. No flashbacks or any real development. You never see her be a mother so you as the player never know her. The mystery is the main driving force but there is not question. The only question is why are they doing this.
About ten hours in you get to the top of the mountain, you’ve met the exposition witch and they introduce the two sons of Thor who again has only been hinted at. You know him tho. So no need to tell you about him. From the marvel movies.
At this point the head in the tree is like no you got the wrong mountain the tallest point in midgar is actually on the giants planet. You’ve fucking already been expositioned to death by the fucking witch while unlocking the gate to all the realms. She literally talks for thirty minutes while you slowly walk around giant hallways. Still unsure why you are even doing any of this. At this point I realized the kid was (spoilers) Loki.
I heard ice giants and tallest mountain and I put it together. Then after fifteen hours the game still hasn’t revealed why you are doing any of this but surprise surprise. In a twist that completely relies on the player knowing from outside information about Thor and Oden by the way, they are bad guys. It’s hinted at with a throwaway line by the kid whose name I’ve completely forgotten. But it does nothing to setup Thor or oden as heroes. They are villains in this world but their introduction is still played like a twist.
It’s fucking dumb. Haven’t even gotten around to the gameplay that is so button mashy I was just pressing the attack button and dodging. On hard it just multiplies the hit points by three and makes you take more damage. The enemies don’t actually do different shit. If take it down to story the enemies have reasonable health but they do in fact do less. I wasn’t having fun and the story wasn’t grabbing me so I asked “why Am I wasting my time playing a boring game?”
Even the high end fight scenes or the huge action pieces have the camera as zoomed into kratos as possible. It’s got transformers syndrome. You can’t make out what is happening.
At one point he jumps down a giant statue to break the ice and the camera zooms in so fucking close to Kratos you don’t see the statue do anything. It’s just loud noises. Obviously a budgetary constraint from the PS4. They can’t have such a massive scene rendered in real time and to keep their one shot they needed to make the player imagine the actual sequence. But if they had lowered the quality and actually showed it off than it would have had the same effect. The player would just imagine the detail.
I remember the sequences in the first two god of war games so vividly and in my mind they seemed so epic. The games weren’t technical showcases. They looked great but they looked worse than other games release at the same time.
Like holding square to upgrade gear with very minuscule effects. Or upgrade systems. Or other RPG mechanics that are completely pointless and worthless. I played half of god of war without upgrading anything and on hard. When I upgraded my guy the bad guys scaled up so I literally saw no change. I just had different button combos I could do.