God of War (2018)

[fatbeard]

Platform-exclusive games make Jack a dull boy.

 

[ijustposthere]

Platform-exclusive games make Jack a dull boy.

All you really need is a playstation and a PC.

 

[ijustposthere]

After you beat this game, make sure you go back home and sleep.

 

[CODE_BLUE56]

Not very far it seems(just past the first ancient?), but damn I am loving this game. The fighting is very active and engaging, and I like the concept of Kratos having his son come along. I am playing on the second hardest difficulty, so I am not making it easy for myself, especially considering this is the first time i've played. But it's fun.

 

[botfly10]

I just finished the questline and about 80% of the game. All I have left really are some Valkyries and collectibles.

I have to say, this game sets a new benchmark for storytelling in the video game medium. I have never played a game where the story telling and gameplay are so seamlessly integrated. The story itself, like the content of it, to me was really good but maybe not great. But the execution of that story - the way they leveraged the strengths of the medium to tell it was pretty astounding.

There were really no extended cutscenes. The ones they did have, were short. Nearly all of the narrative was delivered through exploration, the environment, and dialog that did not interrupt gameplay. This is maybe the first game I have played that felt like it totally left the narrative techniques of movies behind and told a complex, coherent story without leaning on techniques from a different medium. You couldn't make a super cut of just the cutscenes and basically have a short movie like in other games.

The pacing was excellent. There was enough exploration to feel like you have agency in choosing what to do, but fucking zero filler. All the side activities were fucking cool. Shit, half the time, the side stuff was so good it was hard to tell if they were a part of the main story line or not. Even Muspelheim was paced well and did not become a chore imo. For me, every time I started to get bored, there was a big plot point with crazy shit that opened up a whole bunch of new shit.

The combat is amazing in this game. I think its the best melee combat I have ever experienced. Fast but still tactical. Its fluid and twitchy but still slow enough that you have to pay attention and make choices. The two weapons are fucking awesome and the variety of power are cool as shit too. By maybe halfway through, you start to feel like a fucking bad ass, tho its still easy to die if you **** up. But when you are in the zone, you fucking rip shit up. By then end, I had pumped runic and cooldown and fucking melted mobs with runic attacks.

The environmental puzzles were fucking cool. Way better than tomb raider. To me they were challenging enough that sometimes I was running around trying to figure out what the **** I was supposed to do, but they never got frustrating.

Oh, and the game is beautiful. Fucking gorgeous. More than a couple times I just stopped and panned the camera, looking around like holy ****.

Overall, imo this game sets a new precedent for single player story driven games that do not sacrifice gameplay or exploration at all. It kinda of has it all and does everything extremely well. God of War showed up at just the right time show what can be achieved if you don't shoehorn in multiplayer or an open world. An excellent achievement for Santa Monica Studios. This shit is probably in my top 10 for the whole generation, maybe top 5.