GOD OF WAR 3 :)

The third God of War is as far to the right-hand side of the equation as you can get. It looks big, talks big, wears big, a lot of gore and shaders, stalks cavernous, creatively environments and an enormous amount of murdering, billion-polygon enemies, but its technical and cinematic accomplishments are essentially sleight of hand. And the conjuring trick is getting old.

There are some benefits though. For one, you get to play more or less the exact same thoughtfully paced, gratifyingly pissed-off hack and slasher your great grand-daddy once fed into his wheezy old PlayStation 2, right down to the challenges and battle arena that spawn post-story-completion. Which means you’ll once again be picking bones with the gods in the form of the eternally-at-boiling-point Kratos, failing to spare the whip on battalion after battalion of anomalous mythical no-good-niks, square-buttoning them until they detonate under the pressure of bottled-up experience points, right-stick somersalting through gaps in the throng to buy your weapons some cool-off time – time enough, perhaps, to let rip with one of your slower but vastly, vastly more satisfying overarm triangle blows, rebounding particle and bad guy alike skyward, allowing them a brief mid-air respite before star-hopping into their midst to continue the punishment.

Marvelous though the models, textures and effects are from a distance, they’re even more marvelous at proximity. I lost five minutes just walking Kratos in and out of a shadowy patch, watching the eerie Olympian glare disperse across his all but edible pectorals. You can see the little folds of skin around his knuckles, the grain of his scalp. Dozens of moving light sources flow into one heady apocalyptic cocktail, from the arcade cabinet glow of your blades to the harsh glitter of the sun god’s skull you ‘acquire’ during the ascent. Shadows seep and coalesce on the undulating surfaces of colossal mosaics, experience orbs scourge a faint ruddy path through the dust of mountain tunnels.

Series fans should and will invest, as there’s fundamentally nothing was bad here, and wasn’t broken before, but don’t come expecting a big rebirth, and don’t come expecting the game of the year. Kratos is a frequent visitor to the Underworld; perhaps it’s time he stayed there. If i would have to vote out of 10, i would say 8 out of 10.