God of War Collection (God of War II) - PS3

I have to confess, I started playing GoW II before finishing the first one. That was during the first frustrating part of my previous post and I felt I needed a breather while my fury over that STUPID part blew over.

There, now I can resume GoW II in one word : gorgeous.

The art direction is so much better then the original. Environments of areas are distinct and gorgeous. The whole thing takes place in a believable place.

The first game took place in a humongous temple build by a --- human --- to protect Pandora's Box. As much as I tried to suspend belief, I could not reconcile myself with a mere human creating such an undertaking.

Now most of the second game takes place in the palace/temple of the Fates who control even the gods' ... well ... fates. So everything is grand, pompous and crumbling with age. I loved it. All the areas had a distinct flavour that was spot on.



I can't vouch for the look of the game on the PS2, but the PS3 made me sit and just watch in some parts. It was just that gorgeous to me. Very few PS3 native games have done that for me. The use of lighting, bloom, dust, composition. Everything was great. It was in this game that I mostly got annoyed that the camera isn't controllable, because I wanted to look at things. Everything was vibrant and skillfully crafted. Bravo!!!

The gameplay was essentially the same as the first one, so nothing different was experienced there. Well, there were the Pegasus parts and the acquisition of Icarus' wings. That was nice. The game had not dumb frustrating parts. But the tweak was some environments/enemies were enormous and felt like it. Fighting the Colossus at the start blew my mind ... until the battle transferred IN IT!!! So A+ for that!

I felt the story was very tight and kept me wanting to play. It did jumble greek mythology by throwing known figures at you and your main mode of communication was ... well ... killing them. But I enjoyed that a lot. I did find it a bit off-putting (as in the first game) that this supposedly unreachable place is still very populated with corpses of people who obviously DID reach it. They didn't succeed, but they still made it there. But, no matter.

I've heard/read many people who thought the ending was a let-down. I guess I can understand why. But I didn't feel it, because the third game was out and waiting for me to pick it up. Again, I didn't have to wait years before continuing the story. HAHAHA! Suckers! ;) That review I will dutifully fulfill later.

The one thing that kind of bothered me (if I have to find something negative) is that they took out the boss health bars. So I was going about a little bit more blindly as to if I was hitting them correctly. But, I still did succeed in the end.