Kratos is plunged into High Definition in this spectacular collection of the two finest games ever made.
I'll spare you the rehash of the story details as you surely know the ins and outs of the two. The God of War Collection takes advantage of the power of the PlayStation 3 in a big way, solving most of our nitpicking with these two titles by simply tossing more processor and RAM at the issue. God of War sported some of the best graphics available on the platform as it neared the end of its life, so naturally God of War II had to surpass it. Both of them suffered from jagged edges, and God of War II suffered in terms of texture tearing and frame rate. All of these issues are absolutely and completely resolved. The God of War collection has been completely reworked to run at a higher resolution, but that wasn't enough, oh no, the game has given 2 times anti aliasing to ensure that there are no jagged edges present. Since the original game ran at a lower resolution, the upgrade to the improved higher resolution cleans things up nicely as well as restoring some lost detail. Additionally, the game textures have been smoothed over, giving them a much cleaner presentation in both the cinematics as well as game play. God of War and God of War II featured cutscenes that were a mix of pre rendered CGI and in engine work. The CGI still looks impressive as you might expect, but some of the in engine scenes can look rather jarring when compared to the now up sampled game play. It is obvious some efforts were made here, but those scenes were clearly not rebuilt from scratch. It's a small price to pay. Beyond the graphical upgrades, all of the bonus material present on the two PlayStation 2 discs are present here. One thing I found odd is that the God of War bonus material cannot be paused or played from the Xross Media Bar. For whatever reason, the God of War II material is viewable that way, giving you greater control. I'm suspecting this was a limit of the original game and the efforts weren't made to extract them given that most folks couldn't honestly care less or have watched it already on their PlayStation 2. Thankfully, it's all here, nothing has been cut, but unfortunately nothing has been added either.
For those interested in racking up trophies, you'll be happy to know that you can pick up a full host of trophies for both games individually. These range from the Bronze medals for simply completing sections and collecting the quest equipment to the embarrassing "Getting My Ass Kicked" trophy you can achieve by dying enough times to be offered the Easy Mode. There are more challenging trophies including beating the game in under 5 hours, getting a 200 hit combo, battling to the Loom in under 10 minutes, or the completionist trophies for unlocking all other trophies. The games are as violent as ever, with gory action and a intense campaign. It doesn't deliver anything else, but it does give you everything the last two gave, fun!
You'll notice a pattern emerging from this review, other than the graphics and sound which have been upgraded significantly, there are no major changes to this title. If you have not played the God of War series, you owe it to yourself to buy this game immediately. If you have played the God of War series, this is a great chance to relive the controller snapping difficulty present in one of the best pair of adventure games ever made. At a full price tag, it is worth it, every damn penny! Sadly, it isn't available in Europe yet, so I I imported it from America, which was a good choice, as it's worth ever penny of that little extra chipping fee. And with all of the incredible graphical and framerate issues improved, you simply can't go wrong.