God of War II Review

I finished God of War II over spring break, and here's what I think:

First of all, overall, the game is absolutely superb and lives up to the illustrious precedents of it's predecessor. Combat is tight, well balanced, and fun...Kratos is a huge badass capable of absolutely destroying just about everybody you come in contact with if you're good enough, but there's plenty of challenge is getting everything just right. I just played on the normal difficulty, but the harder levels and the Challenge of the Titans mode unlocked after you beat the game supply more than enough replay value.

The story is also just as compelling as the first one, even if Kratos' character is a little less interesting than the conflicted, guilt-ridden anti-hero of the first game...now he's just angry all the time, but it works for him.

Most importantly, the developers addressed the biggest complaint of the first game (only 3 boss battles) and pepper the game with numerous, challenging, awesome boss fights. The use of the context-sensitive, cutscene button press kills are still some of the most satisfying combat mechanic found in any action game. The entire first half an hour or so of the game is basically an expanded boss battle, and goes down as one of the greatest game openings of all time.

Graphically, it's amazing, especially on component cables...at times it looks as good as some next-gen games (though not in the cut-scenes), and the artistic design is once again well done, using a mish-mash of different parts of Greek mythology.

On the bad side, the story was good but not great, Kratos' character wasn't nearly as compelling as last time, and while it's nice that there are other weapons to use, I never really felt the need to or wanted to. There are a couple frustrating parts...the medusa enemies in particular will make you want to pull your hair out...and I was surprised by a couple less-than-ideal camera angles at times. God of War uses a fixed, pre-set camera, which usually worked well to point out where you're supposed to go next and give you a good look at the battle, but sometimes I couldn't see the combat well or was confused as to what to do next because of lack of cues. Part of that might be have because I was playing on my sister's crappy, dark TV, but it was still a bummer to have to look up what to do next on Gamefaqs a couple times (that's probably more because of my own ineptitude though).

Anyway, all in all, it's absolutely great and a wonderful send off for the PS2, which will probably go down in history as one of the greatest consoles of all time. I'll mimic what most review sites are saying and give it a 9.2/10 or so.

I also picked up Lumines Plus, which is a remake of the PSP classic Lumines, a falling block puzzle game which combines music and dazzling visuals. It's a pretty good pick up at $20 if you're a puzzle fan who hasn't played the originals on PSP.