God of War III Review

The opening is a statement of intent: you fight Poseidon while standing on a walking mountain that is itself climbing another mountain, and the camera pulls back far enough to show all three without a cut or a load. Santa Monica built streaming technology specifically so the whole game could hold that trick, and the result is a ten hour sequence with almost no visible seams. Combat is the deepest in the trilogy, with the Blades of Exile as the base, three genuinely distinct alternative weapons and the Cestus giving heavy enemies a real answer.

The bleakness is the problem. Kratos spends the game killing gods in increasingly graphic ways, the camera lingers on it, and by the third or fourth execution the shock has curdled into something closer to tedium. The Hera scene in particular is nasty without being interesting. There is no arc here, only escalation and a hurried redemption in the final ten minutes. As pure craft it is close to untouchable for its generation.