Author: Simulacrum  <nub>    99.47.225.102 Use this link if you want to link to this message and its entire thread of discussion. Post a Msg
Date: 2/13/2025 10:07:47 AM
Subject: God of War 2018

I am really trying to like this game. It has a pretty good story and decent character arcs. Up to a certain point, the combat is very satisfying. After a while, however, it starts fraying.

You begin to notice that you're fighting the same enemies in region X that you were fighting in region Y. They just have different coloring. There's no real difference between the draugrs in the starting area and the blue smurfs in Helheim, other than color and the fact that it's better to use the chaos blades on the smurfs. The trolls are all the same. You fight the same ogre over and over - he's just a different color.

I wouldn't mind this, but eventually every arena generates a black cloud, which in turn spawns every enemy you've run into - waves and waves of them. The cloud starts the spawning, but soon they're just popping up out of the ground, over and over and over -- the same floating eyeballs, the same witches, the same werewolves, the same smurfs.

The whole point of God of War combat is health management. You win if you can make your hitpoints outlast every drawn-out spawn fest. And that's all there is. It never changes.

Well, actually, I forgot the puzzles. I really enjoyed the Nornir chests and most of the other types. But at a certain point, you start running into trap puzzles -- old-school grind wheel and stamper gauntlets, which have absolutely no creativity, so they go along really well with the complete falling-off of enemy variety and anything else that might be interesting. Instead of looking forward to entering a new zone, I started dreading it because I knew I was going to encounter the same spammy, time-wasting things.

I think it's ironic that Dragon Age: The Veilguard and God of War 2018 have EXACTLY the same gameplay design. There is not one iota of difference between the two. Yet one gets mugged for its repetitious looping and the other wins awards. I grant that the story in God of War is marginally better, and what little writing it has is an improvement over Veilguard, but otherwise they're twins separated at birth.

I cannot account for why GoW is considered such a masterpiece. Compared to truly great games like Ghost of Tsushima and the Horizon titles, it's dog poo. Change my mind.