God of War Chains of Olympus *PSP REVIEW*

Ahhh the chains that bind… God of war strikes on the PSP.. Is it a killer app? One that can bring the masses to the PSP? Or is it just shades of Olympus?… My short but sweet review after the break!

 

Let me start this review off with a quick background of my experience with god of war. I originally played it on the Playstation 2 system, I loved it to start, it was gory, it was fun mashing academy action and it was a semi interesting storyline.. Good boss fights as well.. As time went on, I got further and further into it, and I started to get to these area’s that would trap you, and feed you monster after monster after monster in an ultimate endurance test to see if you could kill 30 guys without dying.. This kind of killed it for me and ultimately I gave up the game. I prefer to advance the game and storyline and not waste repeated ours of frustration because I cant beat guy #25 out of 30.. Not to mention I have no idea how many guys are coming, I’m honestly just making up an arbitrary number.

 

Regardless of that, I gave up on god of wars for that simple fact.. But then I was determined to play god of war on the PSP all the way through because many review sites said it was the most beautiful game on the PSP to date, and it was worthy of all your play time. You know what? They are right.. I dare you to find a better looking game on the PSP. It blows me away with what they were able to do on this small system. There’s one point where you’re looking at one of the gods chained up and he’s this huge rock being (yea my greek mythology sucks, bite me) and you see his HUGE hand actually moving and his body, and normally I would expect a half-assed cheap limited gimmicky effect or no movement at all—at least on a hand held. But they pulled off so many good effects and the attention to detail is just wonderful! You’ll open a chest under water and air bubbles will creak out and then rise to the surface. Your chain and slashing effects seem to be as good as the ps2 version! It almost feels like this game is every bit as good as the ps2 version only smaller screen size and smaller textures. It really does look THAT Good. Graphics get the best from me..

 

Okay Sound is sound, it sounds great I have no qualms, obviously the psp isn’t surround sound, so it is what it is.. Lets get to it.. the game play…

 

I’m fairly happy to announce that for someone like me who thought god of war 1 was just far too annoying with those ‘freeze’ points of killing massive amounts of enemies, this game was still HUGELY enjoyable if you like the god of war style of game play. It’s a 3^rdperson perspective, on a set path mostly so not much exploring, you run around and you kill stuff with button mashing. You can use combos and learn to get better at killing, and maybe this is why I sucked at part 1 on the ps2 because I didn’t master the quickest way to kill stuff.. God of war Chains of Olympus does in deed still have those ‘freeze’ moments where it traps you in an area and makes you fight repeated spawning of certain monsters, and sometimes it WILL toss you in with small amount of health and very little health to get back. Those moments do exist on the psp version, but they few and far between and in my opinion not NEARLY As frustrating. There was one time where I started to feel the burn and just simply put my psp into sleep and came back a few hours later and got past it.. That happened probably 1 or 2 times actually. Either way, I did eventually get past those parts and they were not nearly as bad simply because the amount of enemies spawned was not nearly the same at least it didn’t feel that way. And this was on normal difficulty. Not easy mode. Boss fights were a joy, and the last boss impressed me the most.. You know why? Because they decided NOT to be dicks, and if you get the boss to a certain point of health, and die, you start over with her health at that point!! YES! Why do I like that? Because, I don’t believe players should be subjected to having to fight a boss 450 times to learn every single trick of her 17 different modes of attack, just to have to perfect them all in order to kill her JUST so they can claim and additional 3 hours of game play time. That is wrong….. Here they just make you get past each ‘stage’ of her health and if you do, you can restart mid battle pretty much. I still died a few times, it still took me a few tries, but I was never frustrated or felt cheated, I honestly just felt I ‘needed to do better’ and so many games never make me feel that way, they make me feel like I’m being cheated or they are just too damn hard to be worth it. I’m happy to announced at least for bosses, that god of war chains of Olympus did a great job with this.

 

Over all I’m fairly impressed with what they did here. Its definitely a must have if you have a PSP and remotely liked the original god of wars.. Even if you didn’t finish them like I did, but enjoyed the button mashing, you’ll get a fair amount of enjoyment out of this. I’m going to be nice, despite the few times I was thrown into a situation with 5% health and huge guys with big swinging axes and saw blades dicing through the floor completely shrinking my odds of living to about 1 in 1000000, I ultimately had fun and got past those few ‘roughly tough’ moments. I’m going to rate my overall experience with my frustrating being low on the list of feelings I get with this game.. Henceforth my rating is….

 

 

9.0/10