God of War: Ascension Review

The problems start with the premise. Setting a story before the first game means the outcome is known, the character cannot change, and the Furies are villains invented to fill a gap that did not exist. What remains is a competent action game that feels smaller than the one before it, largely because the weapon variety was replaced by an elemental system layered onto the Blades, which sounds deeper on paper and in practice means you pick one element and stop thinking.

Some individual moments still land, and the prison of the damned is a striking piece of architecture. The multiplayer is the genuinely surprising part, a four player arena mode with god allegiances, gear and a control point objective, and it was better than a bolted on mode had any right to be, though the population evaporated within a year. Technically the PlayStation 3 was clearly at its limit. There is nothing offensive here, only a series repeating itself at a moment when it needed to stop and think.