God of War is should be at least played by anyone with a Playstaion 2 and mature enough to handle it.
User Rating: 9.4 | God of War (Greatest Hits) PS2
It’s rare to find an excellent quality game, and even harder to find the quality of an action adventure game like God of War. Sony has created a game infused with a story of revenge, set in Greek Mythology, filled in with one of the bloodiest, over-the-top combat, difficult puzzles and a lot of replay value. Many games inside the action adventure genre focus the game on either the combat aspect, or the puzzle-solving. God of War doesn't do any of that. To put it in simple terms, God of War is one of the best action adventure games you can get on the Playstaion 2. Not to sugar coat it, it shouldn’t be passed up by anyone mature enough to handle it. The story's main character is Kratos, a pale-skinned, tattooed Spartan warrior. In the beginning of the game, Kratos ready to commit suicide. Standing on the biggest mountain in Greece, speaking that the gods of Olympus have forgotten & abandoned him. He jumps off to a desired death, while falling, a woman's voice cuts in saying that the times haven’t been so sweet for Kratos, then flashbacks three weeks before the suicide. This is where the plot begins. He is fighting of undead warriors and a massively huge hydra. While the story is spread out through the game, the initial impression is that he is willing to do anything to get what he wants. The plot is basically the gods of Olympus give you the job to kill Ares, the God of War. But throughout the game, you come to learn that Kratos is a tormented person, only wanting to release himself of his past. While Kratos is a brutal, merciless person, what makes him so amazing is how much he is a badass in the game. While fighting against enemies, Kratos can inflict pain to his enemies in so many ways, because of his default weapon: “Blades of Chaos ". They are similar to an axe, just longer and attached to Kratos' forearms via chains. The face buttons on the PS2 controller give Kratos his basic attacks. You don't have a lot of combos to begin with, but throughout the game, you can power-up the weapons with red orbs. Red orbs are the “loot “from enemies after you kill. Even if you max out the blades, the most difficult combo is fairly easy to pull off. You can make an argument that the game makes the combos too easy. But if that is a negative to the game, its looks great to do the moves, they feel great. Kratos needs more than the blades to defeat a god. Through the game, you will meet with some of the gods to Olympus. Not only do Kratos enemies drop red orbs, some of them drop magic orbs. Each god has a magical weapon for you to defeat your enemies with. Each magic is mapped to each direction of the d-pad. After selecting the magic you want, just hit the button to use the magic. Zeus grants Kratos the power to wield thunder. Aphrodite gives you Medusa's head, which allows you to freeze your enemies in stone. Artemis doesn't give you a magic per se, but she gives you a humongous kickass sword to wield as an alternative to the blades. Like the blades, you can upgrade the magic as well by the red orbs. Each type of magic is effective in its own right. Also, the magic doesn't feel like a filler magic, and with conjunction with the Blades of Chaos creates a variety of combos, which makes Kratos a force to be reckoned with. The abilities the gods give you don’t become obsolete throughout the game. They all are useful, each of the abilities don’t feel like filler magic, and they all fun to use. To increase your magic & health bar, you have to collect gorgon eyes to increase your health bar, and phoenix feathers increase your magic bar. While fighting enemies, there are creatures which can dies with more than the regular cutting them. Some creatures have a mini-game to kill an enemy. For the Minotaur, when you see an icon pop up above its head, you hit that button, and then you rapidly hit the same button until you stab the Minotaur in the throat. And there are other mini-games that have the player doing different things. Instead of mashing the same button, it could have you just hit the right button at the right time, or it could have you move the analog stick in the right direction. There are a lot of contextual procedures in the games, which keep you in game, and when successfully done, the ending result is amazing. You will need all of the abilities for the challenge that God of War gives you. The hard difficulty is available off the bat. The hard difficulty gives you a more demanding challenge. But on normal difficulty, it’s still a pretty harsh game because of the huge amount of different Greek enemies from undead warriors to hydras and every in between. Adding to the variety of the enemies, the game throws them at you at bunches. Even if the smaller enemies are easy to kill, the loads of them could overwhelm you. So if forces the player to be swift with the attacks and have pretty good quality with the block. But the real difficulty comes when you are in a boss fight. From the hydra at the beginning of the games, to the god of war himself, the game doesn’t let up on the difficulty of the bosses. As it may sound, the bosses are hard, but not the type of hard that makes you throw your controller and never play the game again. It is possible to defeat them, just seems impossible. The only bad thing about the boss fights, just not enough of them. There is only 4 or 5 boss fights give or take. But it is totally gratifying to defeat the boss. And while I don’t want to blow the ending to people who haven’t played it yet, let’s just say that the final boss fight is a great way to remember the good old days of hard as hell boss fights. When Kratos isn’t using his brawn to kill enemies, he will use his brain to solve the puzzles when the situation arrives. Since the game does take place in ancient Greece, the puzzles are modeled to what kind of items they would have at that time. Objects like stone switches, levers and stuff like that. But what really set God of War’s puzzles away from other action adventure games are the scale and the variety of the puzzles. It ranges from small things like finding a broken lever and putting it back in the right place to something huge. That something huge, for example is when you’re inside Pandora’s temple. When inside, you are standing in a massive, globular room, you discover a switch that moves the room to different rooms, solving the puzzle in that room, then moving on to the next room. During all this, leading up to one huge puzzle that will lead Kratos out of the area. It will take awhile, but when finishing this puzzle and other ones, it gives you a feeling of success, just like the boss fights. God of War maintains a dark, violent, evil, yet a quite fun tone. Taking place in Greece, all of the usual Greek mythology, mixed with some weird looking changes which benefit the game. All of those nasty, sick looking creatures you would be expecting just not those stupid generic looking ones. Also, the surroundings were given many small touch-ups to give the game the feeling that you were actually in Greece. For example, you’re walking through a hallway, you wouldn’t see just a plain hallway, you sometimes would see lots and lots of dead people all over, covered with blood. The walls would be covered in blood, that type of things really set the atmosphere. The puzzles also have this violent tone in one, you have to grab and pull the head of the skeleton, then put the head into a door, which opens the door. If you are turned off by that kind of stuff, this game isn’t for you. But if you’re willing to try out some dark comedy, God of War is the game to do it. Another and probably most important way the game sets the mood is by the soundtrack and the sound of the game. The music always feels in place, the soundtrack has a good mix of energetic music and low-key music for the quieter moments, and the sound effects are pretty good as well. From running on the ground to the blade cutting though flesh, everything sounds great. But maybe the voice acting surpasses even the sound effects & the soundtrack. Kratos has a voice just appropriate for the kind of game God of War is. The side characters are no slouches in voice either, but maybe the best voice acting is the narrator. The voice is an old village lady, and when you hear her voice, you are instantly sucked in. Add up everything, you get good as good can get. God of War, after everything said deserves the M rating it has been given. If you like blood, there is no shortage of it in God of War. There might be too much of blood in the game, but balanced out with the amount of violence in the game. For one, there is a puzzle in which a guy is trapped in a cage. He is screaming for his life for you to let him out, and then you put him on a switch that shoots fire at him, and he is burned to his death. What the hell did he do to Kratos? The poor guy did absolutely nothing to him. That is who Kratos is. The M rating isn’t all for the violence. There is some nudity here. And a hidden sex scene, which is done in a humorous way. You don’t see the act, but you see a jar on a table, and when you are done, the jar falls and brakes. But after beating a single- player action adventure game, there isn’t much else to make you play the game a second time through. God of War is only about 10-15 hours in length. But God of War is different. After beating is the first time, you unlock a ton of stuff. A deleted level, a video of the making of the game and a whole bunch of other goodies like that. But if you play the game again on a harder difficulty, you unlock even more stuff to give you insight on the game. There is also a mini-game that is pretty hard on its own. God of War does have a lot replay value if you want to keep playing God of War. That being said, God of War isn’t for the weak of heart, and isn’t for the young ones. Lots of blood, and lost of ways to kill your enemies. Loads of violence, with a dark, yet fun tone. Beyond all of this, it is executed to near perfection. The puzzles are hard, the music is great and most of all, and the game is fun. God of War shouldn’t be passed up by anyone mature enough to handle it. 
