Note: After checking this over I'm not completely happy with how it reads, but it's been too long since I played it and I just want this out the way. I think it says everything I want it to.
God of War (PS4, 2018)
The first time I was called "Sir" in a shop is when I bought the God of War Collection for the PS3. I was probably 18 or 19 at the time, and from what I remember the boy serving me was quite young himself. Maybe he was new and nervous. Maybe he felt bad for ID'ing me and was trying to over-compensate. I remember being sort of stunned by it and not really knowing how to react. There are certain points in my life where something has happened and I've just felt old, and that's one that stands out.
How life comes full circle then as after playing God of War (2018), a Kratos for a new generation, I feel really, really old. The game sees the angriest, second-baldest man in gaming shift from the Greek mythology of his previous six games to somewhere up north and covered in snow so he can slaghter everything in Norse mythology. You play as Kratos and new for the experience is his son, Atreus, who you have limited control over during fights against the assorted monsters you run into on your travels.
The first thing I should say is that I went into this game with no expectations and very limited knowledge of what it contained. I knew Kratos had a beard and a child. I think I knew it involved Norse gods. That was it. The joy of the backlog and not really playing AAA games is coupled with not really following the development and release of them, so I can go into something genuinely blind. I knew it was popular, I knew it was well-regarded, that was it.
Even while I was playing I wondered what I thought of the game and what I was going to say and aside from one specific moment which I'll get to eventually, I realised quite early that I didn't think that much of the game. That's not to say I didn't like it, which I didn't really, but I just didn't think about it a lot. Since finishing it I've gone through every measure of a game I can think of - story, gameplay, characters, graphics, world-building and none of them are in any way remarkable. But the thing is, they're not really bad. Some of them can be terrible and I'll get there but for the most part... I suppose explaining why it's so forgettable is better than just saying it's forgettable.
First up, story. The game starts with Kratos' wife dead and he and son building a funeral pyre for her. Then it turns out she wants her ashes scattered from "the highest peak in all the realms." What follows is a seemingly endless excursion into various realms to try and find the peak. Great. Quite early on in fact the game stopped making any sense at all and I just followed objective markers, did whatever I had to do and then followed whatever came up next. The way you interact with the world made me really indifferent to discovering Kratos and Atreus' role in it, and I never really felt absorbed by anything that happened as a result.
Bizarrely, this didn't make me feel as if I was missing out on anything. I've seen praise for the way the character of Kratos' dead wife is depicted through hints and memories but for me, a game starting in medias res like this needs to do more. Both Kratos and Atreus clearly care deeply for this person, and by the end it turns out she was leading them through everything all along!, but for me there's very little to be invested in. As a result the central conceit of the game and the relationship of the two main characters the game is built on are largely meaningless to me, so right from the start I'm not really caring.
I'm going to switch the order of my topics around a bit and combine characters and world-building together. It's been a while since I played the original God of War games but from what I remember I killed everything in Greek mythology. Literally everything. As I recall you kill Gaia, literally the earth, so there's really not anywhere else to go from there. Perhaps I'm biased because of my own literary background but there's a familiarity with Greek mythology for me where the actions in those games mean something to me. Even briefly, I put on the first God of War the other day and it starts with Kratos on a ship being attacked by the Hydra. Head into the ship a bit and Poseidon turns up, says he's king of the sea and he can give Kratos powers to kill the Hydra. Athena turns up and hints she's Kratos' conscience. Kratos goes and kills the Hydra. Great. I know who everyone is, why they're there, what they're doing. And it's really cool because I've just killed a mythical sea monster using magic powers given to me by the king of the sea.
In contrast, I can tell you three things about Norse mythology. Thor is a god who has a big hammer. Odin is a god. Loki is a god. Fourth thing, people who die in battle go to Valhalla. That's it. That's all I knew. It's all I know now. If you've played the game you'll know that despite being referenced in relation to literally everything and everyone you encounter, Odin doesn't turn up at any point. Neither does Thor. Neither does Loki, really. This is bad for two reasons. First, I spend the game hearing about the fearsome, terrible Odin doing all of these things to the lands and the realms and the giants and... he's not there. At all. Second, the characters who are there are meaningless to me because I don't know who they are and they all just sort of turn up, so there's little consequence to what's going on.
Take the guy who largely features as the game's main bad guy, Baldur. Here I thought Baldur was just a character with a gate in an RPG but no, he's... is he Odin's son? One of them? Either way he turns up with no explanation looking like the smuggest millennial barista you've ever seen - topless, body covered in shit squiggly tattoos, braided beard and the sides of his head shaved. Great, very fearsome. And all our encounters with this person feature a thundering trade of blows between him and Kratos. Only he's immortal so even when Kratos drops a cliff on him or throws him off a dragon, nothing happens. Great.
For several years now I've had a fear popular culture has passed me by. There are many reasons for this I won't go into but there are many times where this feels like a very modern game to me. The design of Baldur is one thing but in a game with very few characters, it's remarkable how generic some of them seem. Take the two dwarves who you can visit to upgrade your weapons and armour, the obvious comic relief of the game who seem to exist in a twitchy, ironic way where they're clearly supposed to be funny because they're a bit kooky and a bit adult and just so done with everything. It's annoying. They're annoying.
Talking of Baldur and modern popular culture, there's a sequence when he turns up. I forget why, but you end up fighting him. I think he steals Atreus and flies off on a dragon, in a sequence which in no way looks anything like Shadow of the Colossus. I'll complain more about the camera in the game later but you jump on, chase after Baldur then you start punching him. Then he starts punching you and you can dodge. Then you punch him again and he falls off. Here I realised what this game reminded me of. It's a Marvel movie. It's characters I don't know, who you need a comprehensive knowledge of multiple prior works to understand or care about them in any way, doing something ridiculous which is completely disconnected from the player, and then nothing of any consequence happens to them after. I don't know who these people are, I don't know why they're fighting, but I do know the fight will end with nothing happening to either of them and the game will make out that this is just the start, and an audience I don't relate to will think they've seen the greatest work of human creativity and imagination.
By far the most baffling character in the game is Mimir. Mimir is a man who was Odin's assistant until one day Odin did what Odin does and put Mimir in a tree so he could torture him. At some point Kratos needs to cut Mimir's head off and take it with him so from that point on he has comic relief and convenient exposition with him at all times, not just when he's visiting the dwarves. Mimir is also, for some reason, Scottish and of course when I first realised that I just felt my stomach drop. I don't get it. The accent is actually the least bad part of the head because it's accurate. I have too much else to say about the game to focus on this but it was still just a source of endless cringe.
Let's forget about his accent now and focus on how God of War (2018) does world-building. In a previous life I played Final Fantasy XIII and I had never played a JRPG before. I had barely played an RPG. I got... some distance into the game and I had no idea what was going on. For a largely linear game it was very bad at introducing characters, setting or any detail about the world. It did have a very detailed section of data logs in the pause menu though which told you what was going on. You know, rather than explain anything as it actually happened when you first experienced it. I can still remember the Zero Punctuation description word for word: "This is not good story-telling! You're supposed to weave exposition into the narrative not hand the audience a f***ing glossary."
In God of War (2018) there are frequent 'Rune Markers' which only Atreus can read. You press square and a note appears in his diary which you can open and read and get a nice story about something from Norse mythology which isn't actually featured in the game, you just get to read it in lieu of the world itself having actual interesting things in it. You get updates to his diary whenever you meet a new enemy as well, usually updates about how to kill them. You can also find shrines dotted about the world depicting the giants doing some stuff, and when you go out into the game's attempt at an open world section the head will start telling you about the history of a giant you've never met, which has no connection to anything you're actually experiencing at that moment. There's a seemingly endless selection of these things so if you like reading, this is the game for you.
I say the game attempts to do open world and I don't really know how else to describe it. I've been trying hard here to not compare this to the previous God of War games because I don't think it's relevant and I think the game is supposed to be different enough to be considered distinctly, but it's worth doing here. The camera in those games was fixed. It moved as you moved through levels and it might have been annoying on occasion, but it almost always worked. With a largely linear path for you to take, this was fine. God of War (2018) has a largely linear path that the main story takes place on but there is a wider world and several other areas for you to explore at your own leisure.
This structure has many flaws. The first is those stories I mentioned. Both those and things Atreus says reference things which could have happened at any time. If for instance you focus on the story and do most of that, then do some rowing and exploration, you get a bunch of dialogue which feels incongruous with where you've actually reached in the story. This doesn't help my earlier complaints about the story and its singificance, and it ends up leaving the game feel disjointed and poorly structured. It doesn't help here either that the map itself is borderline useless, with the only actual map you can look at being a stylised version in the pause menu which you need to keep checking every few seconds to make sure you're going in the right direction. It also doesn't help that aside from one or two areas which are fleshed out, most of the world you explore is all pretty boring, with some basic puzzles, the same wall climbing you get everywhere else and the same drab, grey rocks everywhere. There are different realms you can visit but there's very little difference between them aesthetically.
The world itself suffers from my earlier complaints about Norse mythology. The game takes place in the realm of Midgard. You are inside Tyr's Temple on the Lake of Nine, which has a bridge you can move round to visit statues. Inside Tyr's Temple is Yggdrasil the tree of life and if you collect the nine travel runs you can use them on Yggdrasil and travel to the other realms. You must travel to Alfheim to fill this flask the witch gives you with the Light of Alfheim in order to power the realm travel. While you're there you need to get involved in the endless war between the light elves and the dark elves. Along your journey you can collect runes so you can travel to the realms Muspelheim and Nifleim and eventually to get to Jotunheim the realm of the giants you have to turn Tyr's Temple upside down. Also within the Lake of Nine there is the World Serpent, a giant snake eating its tail which the world is built upon who you talk to and as you talk to him he comes out of the water so the lake recedes and you can explore more of the land.
This game is absolutely incomprehensible to me, and this is why I told that story about God of War making me feel old when I was younger. At just about no point in the story of God of War (2018) did I have the faintest clue where I was, what I was doing, where I was going or why I was doing it. There might be a story in here somewhere but a combination of the open world design being very poor and the explanations of that world being out of sight and unengaging, I had no idea. I don't think it was a long game, I'd say 12-15 hours would get you through the story, but it felt like every time I put the game on I was being faced with a new place and new creatures with new names that had no connection with what I had encountered before. This made the whole experience feel inconsequential and uninspiring.
On to gameplay now, and this isn't great either. The problems with the camera really shine through here now. In previous God of War games you had levels and you had enemies. The camera showed you all of them and you could direct your attacks accordingly. In God of War (2018) you get maybe five or six enemies at most, and full third person control over the camera. But the camera is always a bit too close behind Kratos, so there are really awkward indicators which pop up if there's something behind you, so you turn when they flash red and you can't actually find the enemy that was apparently targeting you because it's moved or because it's such an unremarkable design you can't actually see it immediately. It doesn't help that the main weapon is an axe, which requires you to get up close to anything you want to kill. But then sometimes there are enemies a bit further away which you can target with your axe to throw it at them. Using a control system which feels like projectile aiming was shoehorned in about five minutes before the game reached the shelves. Eventually you adapt and attack enemies from miles away, throwing the axe at them until they're done. You unlock Kratos' classic blades later on but even the fun is taken out of these, the range is much smaller and it just feels like a much less involved experience than a button mashing, hack and slash game should be.
That said, the enemies themselves don't offer much. Standard enemies all look the same and differ little in their attacks. There are tougher enemies with more health but they move slower and you can still dodge roll them easily. The minor boss fights feature trolls or ogres or something and they appear in several different colours throughout the game, with no difference in the actual act of fighting them. Some enemies are blue and some are orange, this means you use your ice axe against the orange ones and the fire blades against the blue ones. Eventually I gave up and put the difficulty on easy, not because I was struggling to beat anything but because I was getting bored having to press R1 so many times.
Even these boss fights feel detached. In previous God of War games, a mini-boss fight usually ended with a quick time event with a few buttons for you to press at the right time which did a cool cinematic and really showed off the gore. In this game there's nothing, you just attack until it stops moving. If you hit enemies enough times you can stun them and then press R3 to do a finisher on them but this does nothing for me either, and it's usually awkward to do if there are other enemies around.
With that in mind I need to mention the Valkyries. This is a side-quest in God of War (2018) where the Valkyries, who guard and protect the souls of the dead, have had something happen to them. You have to go and find and fight and defeat eight of them to then be able to face the Queen at the end. This is the hardest boss fight in the game and after playing most of the game on easy, let me describe the difficulty spike here. The entire game is basically a flat line. Then you reach this final fight and the difficulty curve turns at a right angle and shoots off into space. I hated this last fight. It was so cheap, so inexplicable, so out of place with everything else I had faced I could barely believe it was happening. It was like every complaint I had about the combat being easy had been saved up and thrown back at me at once, with attacks which took away far too much of my health and seemed impossible to dodge. After this battle, I knew I was never going to play a Soulsborne game because this was not fun. This was not satisfying. This was tedious. Despite everything I've said and I'm going to say, this is the only part of the game I genuinely hated.
My struggles to beat the Valkyrie Queen led me to one of the game's most annoying modern foibles - the menu system. The armour, the weapons, the upgrades for these and the colour-coded rarity system with random drops which you just get in games nowadays. I'd love to know when the meeting happened and it was just decided you don't get upgrades any more, you get random drops and you get resources in crafting and everyone can play a unique way! Which is exactly the same as everyone else's bar one or two numbers being different and someone having the Magic Cross of the Ancient hanging from their belt rather than the Enchanted Cross of the Not Quite Ancient Burning Souls.
If the runes and lore and the enemy information was in a menu I was never reading, my attempts to understand the armour and the upgrades more than made up for it. To me, this sort of system exists to cover up a team too lazy to balance a game themselves. I don't think the combat is varied enough to need any of the myriad different enchantments and types or armour or weapon you can use. I don't know if higher difficulties make better use of this, but even then I could see it just being an irritant. You can't 'save' an armour set for instance, so if you wanted to swap your equipment for a different kind of enemy you'd need to keep track of your best setup, or get used to reading all the descriptions every time. Just give me a balanced, continual growth of health and abilities, which might even mirror the growth and experience of the character I'm playing as, and centre the game around that. Don't cop out and give me infinite options with very little variance between them.
I almost forgot this one last detail, but there's one other factor which exemplifies everything wrong with the system. You can upgrade your weapons with certain unique resources you find in the world. Fine. The final upgrade requires one object. Except you don't just click on upgrade while you're talking to the dwarves. You have to change the magic fire of timewasting into something else, then use it to upgrade the weapon. Why? There is literally no reason for this. It's an unnecessary step of administration that serves no purpose. None. There's no reason for it. Why is it there? Why don't you just press a button that says UPGRADE? Why do you need to change the thing into another thing - with no cost, no time, nothing - to use it? Who made this system? Who came up with this? I'm glad this came at the end of the game since I'd long since stopped caring. Maybe similar stuff happened before the final upgrade I don't know, but... why?
This is where I start to feel old. This sort of system was in Horizon Zero Dawn and it's the sort of light, non-committal RPG and crafting elements which just add nothing which get to me. There are games where finding armour and weapons and resources to upgrade them and tweak your character's stats to affect gameplay are a central aspect of the game's design. They're extensive, well-rounded and add something to the experience. Here, they just feel token, as if they're just in the game because that's what games have now. They also feel completely out of place, given how little affect they have on a hack and slash game which purports to have as much depth as this does.
One last note about the gameplay which will lead into my final point. Atreus has a bow and arrow which you can use in battle. In addition to pressing R1 and R2 and wrestling with the camera, you can press square and he'll fire an arrow. Eventually you unlock electric ones which stun enemies and chain the electricity to others once you've upgraded them. That's it.
What then of this game's crowning glory, the relationship between Kratos and Atreus? Dad of Boy, after all. God of War 3 saw Kratos at his most human and vulnerable, with more detail about his dead family and then his surrogate daughter used to show his feelings. Here he has an actual young child with a newly dead mother, and he has to show and teach this boy how to live in a world that's trying to kill him. All while wrestling with how to tell him he's actually a god. To start with this relationship is interesting and explored delicately, as it's clear Kratos is realising he has to be a complete parent rather than just teaching the boy about fighting and survival.
It's possible I missed it and I'm not going to check now but I'm not sure what age Atreus is supposed to be. I'd guess pre-teen. From what I've seen of the promo artwork for the sequel he barely looks like a teenager in that either. That or he has severe babyface. Anyway, Atreus is young and for the most part the youthful innocence he faces situations with is appropriate and it's an easy but effective counter to Kratos' usual approach to things. While the rest of the game was washing over me I latched on to this relationship as the only engaging thing being presented to me.
Eventually though he does tell Atreus that he's a god. Then things change. He starts acting like a spoiled brat. Admittedly this is a pretty accurate reflection of any young god in any mythology - they learn they're invincible and start acting like it. In this game though it comes out of nowhere and seems so incongruous with Atreus' character up until that point. He's sensitive and a bit distant from Kratos because of it, then suddenly he switches to be annoying. Then you go a bit further in the story, you have that stupid fight with Baldur and he stops and goes back to the way he was but a bit apologetic. This is where the problem of the open world comes back too, he was apologising for acting like that several in-game hours after it had happened, I just hadn't heard it at the right time. Even if I had I don't know if it would have made things any better.
The Kratos/Atreus relationship was the one thing I was vaguely aware of going into this game and I'm surprised at how badly it let itself down. There are very few characters in the game and as I've said even fewer of them feel properly explained and now the two the game is centred around have a very uneven relationship. In addition to providing exposition when it's required, Mimir throws in the odd moment of comic relief. Kratos saying "quiet, head" every so often is funny and I did like the added moments of brevity from Kratos. Really the only success I can honestly say the game has is rounding out Kratos as a character a bit more, it's just a shame it had to come from such a mediocre game. It's also a shame this was still all it really had going for it.
The downfall of that father and son relationship ultimately sums up how I felt about the game. This one saving grace I was holding on to as something to interest never mind excite me just stopped, with little warning and barely believable justification. Yet, I wasn't upset. I wasn't angry, I wasn't disappointed, I was just briefly incredulous at how sudden and out of step it was with everything else that was going on, but I didn't care. I was too uninvested in the rest of the game to care, and I don't think I can imagine a more damning description of anything, not just a video game.
By every measure I apply to video games, God of War (2018) wasn't good. It didn't play well, it didn't look special, the characterisation was uneven and largely uninteresting, the world wasn't presented very well and I really didn't care about any of these things. Technically there must have been something going on because I've neglected to mention the noise my PS4 made when it was on. In five years it's the loudest I've heard my console. Even at the start menu before I'd pressed "New Game" the noise was absolutely intolerable. That was probably the most impressed I was at any time playing the game. I suppose I'm just glad I pre-emptively followed Kratos' advice and didn't have any expectations because if I was looking forward to this I would have been very, very unhappy.
arstechnica.com
