God of War Review

The opening drops a hydra on you before it has explained a single button, and that confidence never lets up. Santa Monica's combat is built around the Blades of Chaos as crowd control, with light and heavy strings that stay readable in a room of twenty enemies, plus a grapple and a context kill that make execution a reward rather than a cutscene. The camera is fixed and composed like a painting, which sidesteps the framing problems most action games of the era fought with and lets the studio hide loading inside architecture, so the whole thing plays as one continuous shot.

Pandora's Temple mixes block puzzles and platforming that stall the momentum, and the spinning blade corridors are a spike that reads as padding rather than challenge. Kratos is one note, a man who shouts, and the flashbacks give him a past without giving him a personality. As spectacle engineering it is close to flawless.