sati_84

GoW:CoO is a really nice game, but it has some serious flaws.

At first, I must say the graphics are beyond awesome. It's pure PS2 quality on your hand-held, you have to see it to believe it! Nothing wrong with this part. The story is really nothing special, it's about Kratos who wants to get rid of his visions, but the Gods don't let him, and he must fight. That's it. No twists, no turns, and at the end you get a somewhat disappointing conclusion.

Now, we got to the crucial point of the game: the controls and the gameplay. During your adventure, you will encounter many enemies (but the fights are in more than 60% of the cases are blatantly staged!), and you have to use your weapons and magic. Now the control scheme is brilliant, considering that the PSP lacks a second analog stick. I've never played any GoW games before on PS2, so I thought it was meant to be this way. And the guys did a splendid job with the port. So you won't be suffering to make Kratos do what you want him to do. But you will be suffering when you will find out that you don't have complete control over him! And this is the greatest flaw of the game. Although the gameplay isn't too inspiring (puzzle solving, staged fighting, puzzle solving, staged fighting, and so on, ad infinitum), the beautiful graphics will blow you away as you discover new areas, and because of this, you won't mind the mediocre gameplay schemes, trust me. But there are serious problems in the area of controls. You can launch your heavy attacks with the triangle, your light attack is on the square, jump is X, and sometimes the game will prompt you to press circle. You can chain your attacks, launching multiple hit combos on your opponents, and that's nice, BUT... and here it is, the big BUT, which ruins your experience: once Kratos started a combo, you can't get him out of it! This is especially frustrating, when you trying to play the "one hit and you're dead" challenge, where you have to abuse the L trigger + triangle combo to win. No, seriously it's about the only way you can defeat them in that challenge! Whenever I tried to play it skillfully, I've always seen 2-3 seconds before I got hit that I will get hit. And this is wrong! Being able to see that you're about to get hit and not being able to do something about it is the worst video game experience you could ever have. Except for playing a really bad game, of course, but that's beside the point. The point is: there are combos that last for 10-15 seconds, and once you've started them, Kratos will do it, no matter what you push when you realize that the enemies will strike you. And yes, it's the same with the enemies too! So once they've started the attack animation, you can do nothing to prevent them from hitting you - and this is just bullshit! Sorry for being this harsh, but this is a really poor combo system. You have to have some kind of combo breaker move, for Christ's sakes! But no. You don't.

So all in all, when playing on medium, this is not really an issue, because the game isn't that hard. Your frustration begins on hard and god mode and when you play through the challenges. When there's no room for errors, this game fails to give you the results of your skills. Even if you're the best reflex-gamer of the world, you won't be able to enjoy your reflexes, because you cannot use combo breaker moves. This ruins the gameplay when you want to beat the game in god mode, and sadly it ruins any more experience with this game, because after you've realized this, you can't just look away. And Kratos' moves are beautiful, and some combos are like a dance, so this game really deserved a better combo system! I'm sad, but this game really isn't that good. It's worth playing through once, but then you can forget all about it. It's a real pity...

I would've given it a 6/10, but the great graphics saved the game, so it's 7/10 now. Rent or buy? RENT, definitely.

I sincerely don't get what's all this fuss about this game. This is a mediocre platformer with great graphics. I mean the graphics are good, but the story is disappointing and the gameplay is boring. It's so repetitive! And it's not even fun after a few hours...

You're just doing the same things over and over again. And near the end, the game gets hard and annoying. Not a good game, I didn't like it. And the story doesn't even get a decent conclusion! It was just so anti-climatic...

The good:

1. Graphics are nice 2. The cutscenes are funny 3. It has a style in graphics 4. The enemies are cool

The bad:

1. Leveldesign. Repetitive, and there are only a few great ideas, like the floating wood in the sawmill. The rest is nothing special. 2. The controls are sometimes awkward 3. The camera is driving you nuts constantly! When you're backed up against a wall, there's no way you can turn it around to see what's directly in front of you! It's madness! Even though you can control the camera with L and R, you often curse the inane camera movement... 4. The story. It's clichéed, it's boring and it doesn't have a closure! What were they thinking??? It was so anti-climatic, I stared at the screen of my PSP for minutes after the endsequence, and thought "That's it?" Come on! 5. The bossfights aren't exciting. Something is wrong with them. I can't tell you what, but they weren't as good as they could've been...

Overall, I give it a 6/10.

To be honest, I couldn't play this game all the way through. I wanted to play an exciting platformer, but what I got was almost zero excitement! The structure of this title is very simple: you start with a platformer part, where you swing on bars, pull switches horizontally and vertically, solve puzzles, walk on ledges, do the wall-run from The Matrix (well, this is a nice feature, I have to admit), and stuff like that. And then, here comes the part, where you have to fight. But these fights are staged, and just aren't a least bit interesting! Let me tell you what's wrong with them.

First of all: there are only a few types of enemies, you can fight. And... no bosses! You have to slice scarabeuses in half, you have to slash dozens of sand creatures, and they are always the same! Nothing new for so long, I gave up the game at 50%. And yeah, you only have a few fighting moves as well. At the first few occasions, you can beat them only using one move, when the prince jumps from their heads to the behind of their backs, turns mid-air and slashes them. It's a great move, but it's unblockable by your poor antagonists, so you repeat it over and over again, you win but you become bored very quickly. And if you want to fight nicely without abusing a move too much, I've got news for you: you can only use your sword and your dagger, you can slash and stab with them and that's it. No combo moves, no skillful fighting, no reaction moves, combo breakers, no nothing. It just blows my mind! Why is this so goddamn lame? Later on in the game, the almighty move becomes blockable by the enemies (the developers must have been realized how idiotic was it actually...), but now the problem is that... they ALWAYS block it! Well... you still can't fight skillfully because the prince's recovery time after a failed (or blocked) strike is unbearably slow (I've seen turltles moving much faster), and if you're on the ground, the enemies can hit you repeatedly, and the prince just doesn't want to get up! What's wrong with him??? Ridiculous. Anyways, so they always block the head jumping move, you can't do nothing... but hey, you have another unblockable move: this time you have to back against a wall, press the jump button and then the attack button, and voilá: they can't block this move! Seriously: it's ludicrous! Close to that point when I stopped playing this game, I won a fight repeating this method about 30 times! Come on! When you play the jumping/puzzle solving parts you get a straightforward and linear experience. Nothing exciting or innovative there. The fight parts are extremely poor, so there's no reason to get this game so far. Two aspects were missing from my review, but now I will mention them now: the story and the ability to reverse time.

So, the story is nothing special, really. The only thing worth mentioning here is the interactions between the prince and the girl (Oh, my god, I forgot her name... Talk about a poor story, they couldn't even emphasize the second most important character in the game!), but those are so few and far between... and they aren't even always funny. So the story sucks. The prince's narrative is a nice thing, but once you get used to it, it's not a big deal anymore, besides he only talks at the beginning, then very rarely, and then when you die.

Throughout your "adventures", you can use the sands of time, which are giving you the ability to turn back time. It requires some "four dimensional thinking", but not much. After a while, it gets old too. And in the platformer parts, you only use it to get a continue after you miss a jump. So what's the point? All in all, I give this title a solid 6 stars. It's an average game, they didn't screw it up completely and for a while it was entertaining. But then it became repetitive, and couldn't give me anything new. Boring platform parts, lame fights. The graphics are amazing, hence the +1 star. I say, avoid it, if you don't want to get frustrated!