God of War: Ascension - Page 3

here is gamespot's review: 8/10 (spoiler alert)

This has RENTAL written all over it. Short single player, multiplayer is nothing great. I am looking forward to playing it, but once should suffice which I can get out of my system with a cheap redbox rental.

Yeah, the reviewer lost all credibility with me when he went on a long tale about the parry feature being a new one. That shows that he has obviously not played the other games in the series, or just was a button masher and didn't actually do anything. Parrying has been present in every single game since GoW II at the very least. (It may have been in GoW I, but I haven't played that game in a while). So once he started talking about the parry being new, and then is whining about how the game is the same as all others in the series, I knew that he had likely never played the other ones.

The topper was when he said that Multiplayer was the best thing out there. While the Multiplayer may be enjoyable, anytime a reviewer posts a bunch of false statements and then goes and hails Multiplayer additions, I stop reading. The review sounded like another case of a writer just being told to write a review about a subject that he has no idea about.

Adam Sessler's review for Rev3Games:

I played the opening act and it's just as you expect from a God of War game. Epic, bloody, and brutal. Not sure why the reviews are so much lower than usual for this series, but I like it so far.

Same here, played about an hour last night. Got through what I had already played in the demo. If you like GoW then you will like this. Nothing really new. It just doesn't have the wow factor in it like GoW3 did when you first fought the titan. Still fun though!

So far, I think this game is... well.... "different". It still is a God of War game, but at the same time it seems more like a game designed to be played on a portable system as opposed to the PS3. GoW III was truly epic in scale and nature and filled with a great balance of puzzles and combat. Ascension seems to be fairly devoid of combat thus far. Still, it is early in the game for me and so I can't make a full decision on it just yet. Just saying that through only about an hour and a half of gameplay there hasn't been anything that has made me go "wow".

One thing that is TRULY aggravating for me is that there are no save points in the game. Instead of stepping into a glowing field and pressing a button to bring up the save game screen, the game automatically saves the game every few seconds for you (and in the meantime pops up a gray box in the bottom right corner of the screen that says "Saving" which gets annoying after a while). When starting up the game, you have to choose a profile slot to use and the game will save automatically to that profile. You cannot make multiple saves files under the same profile. If I had a manual I could probably look up the information regarding saving the game and what options you have, but they didn't include a paper manual in the game. There is only a digital manual that you have to install onto your hard drive in order to read it. I understand that printing out a manual costs money, but why not include a .pdf file so I could print it out myself? Ugggh.

I have heard that the complaints about some things have been heard by the developers (especially the sound levels and music being "off"), and that a patch will eventually be released. Who knows when though. I still will hope that the rest of the game is enjoyable and that the sense I get that the single player is more of a PSP game rather than a PS3 game won't be further entrenched by the game length being obsurdly short.

I find myself having trouble seeing where I am on the screen sometimes. During some combat phases, it zooms out too far and everything is small and I get lost in the enemies. I'm playing on a 54" screen and it's still hard to see sometimes.

Overall, I'm enjoying it but not as much as GoW 3. Like the poster said above, there hasn't been any wow moments yet.

I agree with many of the criticisms posted so far. I think my main problem is that I just finished Tomb Raider which is far superior to this game. I am about half way through and have not been wow'd at all. Last night I came across a bug that screwed up the camera angle so I could no longer see Kratos. It required me to quite the game and restart the chapter from the chapter select screen. It is nice to have chapter select however, I believe this option was not available in the prior games.

Correct. But in all other games in the series you had the ability to save at multiple points within a section of the game, and had as many save slots available as you had space on your hard drive. For some unknown reason, Todd Papy decided that the user should not be able to save to as many files as they see fit, and 100% removed that ability from the game. Now, it will autosave for you every five minutes or so (it seems) and if your profile gets corrupted for some reason, you lose everything and have to start all over again. I guess that's how they planned on extending the playing time? Okay, okay. That's a bit too harsh.

I'm enjoying the game more and more as I play it more. At chapter 10 right now, and looking forward to the rest of the game. Still, no "wow" factor yet.

Also, I discovered that SSM has released the manual in the form of a .pdf file at the god of war website. So I was able to download it and can print it out as needed. That is something pretty cool. The developers for MLB The Show '13 didn't even include a manual for those of us who downloaded the game from the PSN, nor can they be bothered to release a .pdf file on their website. Sounds petty, but it makes me think less of them if they can't take a few minutes to provide a file for us to read/print in order to better understand the game we bought. Ah well.

I know I said I was gonna purchase this on day 1,...I think I'll hold for the price to drop.
I also just finished Tomb Raider and most of you agree on the same.

I just finished a second play through of GOW 3 a few days ago, so that game will probably be affecting my feelings on this one.

I'm having fun with Ascension. I've played about 3 hours so far, on normal difficulty. The game looks excellent, with the biggest improvements being the backgrounds. No more static PS2-looking paintings standing in for walls and landscapes. Everything looks more crisp- you can tell they've improved over 3.

Combat has some changes but they make sense, becoming second nature after a little practice. Kratos definitely moves a little quicker now, it's subtle but noticeable.

I haven't noticed any problems with the difficulty but I'm (probably) only 1/3 of the way through the game. The best way I can describe the difficulty would be that it's more like the original GOW. That is, the base enemies you first meet are not pushovers and it goes up from there. I hope they don't ruin the whole difficulty balance with a patch just to fix one section, because it feels right so far.

One thing they can patch is the audio. When set to Surround 5.1 or Dolby ProLogic II, the audio is very quiet overall, fades in and out, and is even a little out of sync during cutscenes. Set it to Stereo and the levels stay up where they should be, though you only get your fronts if you run a 5.1 setup. GOW 3 has audio problems but not at this scale. Annoying but playable, and an unusual bug from a studio that makes solid games.

If you were looking forward to more GOW, then Ascension is just the ticket. It's like an old friend come back to visit with some new stories to tell.

If you are hoping for a revolution or big changes in the GOW formula, then this is not for you. This is God of War, like it or not.

I ran in to a few areas where they pulled the camera back way too far and it made it hard to see where you are when enemies are attacking you. I sit about 8 feet away from my 46 inch tv, and I had to move up to try to see where I was. This was mainly in the first section of the game.

the guy who was in charge of the camera zooming in and waaayyyy out until you can barely see kratos, he needs to get fired. seriously i was just tapping triangle and square just to survive. i didnt even know what kratos was doing. yea theres some gigantic boss fights in this game, we see the scale. but they didnt do it right. kinda ruined some of the gameplay.

I sure hope they fix the sound issue before i beat the game, currently set to stereo, since that's what sounds best.

I don't know what these reviews are talking about because this game is excellent. But barring a miracle, I'll be counting on the Trial of Archimedes nerf, otherwise, I'll never beat it. Those Medusas with their half the board tail whips and the witches with the electricity that follow you all over the arena are just too much. If I manage to make it to the second wave, I have almost no health left.

ive played every god of war game ever made for the ps2/3/psp and this one is the most annoying and buggy and least interesting one made so far. ive died in the game more than in all the other gow games combined. just as crappy and cheap as RE6 in my opinion. bad camera angles. bad audio. weak story. extremely hard fights. feels like this game was made in couple months by interns or new hires

God of War has a story? Interesting. Guess I was too busy collecting Cyclops eyes to notice.


But what's buggy about it? It's just as highly polished as the first three and I'm all the way to chapter 28.

at the end of chapter 12 i think when i met with the dying oracle, whos been crushed by rocks. the game kinda got me stuck there. i cant go any further in the game. i was supposed to go north towards the opening to wards delphi but its not letting me. i tried restarting the game but still stuck..

Wow. So I finished up the game earlier today and, well, this is one of the least enjoyable GoW games in the series. It's kind of sad, really, just what they did with the game after how enthralling and enjoyable GoW 1, 2, and 3 were. Even GoS and CoO were enjoyable since the faults they had were pretty acceptable due to their being on the PSP. I just wish they had done this game better, but with them deciding to shoe-horn the MP into it I think the dev team's focus wasn't anywhere near where it should have been. Graphically it looked amazing and there were some aspects that were just mind blowingly awesome, but not enough to keep up with what the other entries in the series have done. I guess I'll list my issues below in no particular order.

1 - Game Length. This game just felt way too short. There was so much "dead space" in the game that it never really felt like it was getting going, and then when it did, it was quickly over. Throw in the somewhat confusing progression of the game, and it just felt incredibly short. Especially in comparison to the epicness of the main three games in the series.

2 - Change to the Save System. I mentioned this earlier, but EVERY OTHER GAME IN THE SERIES had this done perfectly with the save halos and the ability for you to make multiple save files where needed. In this game, you have to rely on the autosave feature and you only get one save file. If your user profile is corrupted, you lose all of your progress. If you want the choice to have multiple save files, in past games you could do it. In Ascension, you don't. If there is a bug with the autosave feature itself, you could find yourself losing hours of progress due to the software forgetting to autosave for you.

3 - Glitches. There are lots of glitches popping up in the game that I don't recall seeing in the other GoW games. Cameras getting stuck, bosses getting stuck in loops that make it so you can't finish them off, button prompts not showing up on screen causing you to die, autosave not working properly, music and sound suddenly cutting out, and some others that I haven't run into yet but others across the web have been reporting.

4 - Underwhelming Musical Score. Perhaps a lot of this was due to the glitch involving the audio cut-outs, but the musical score was just overall quite lacking. It didn't provide the energy that was always there in other games. I guess this was amplified by my next point.

5 - Low level of combat. Don't know if it was just me, but there seemed to be large open spaces throughout the game with little to no enemy combat like we saw in the other games in the series. It just seemed empty and barren, and with the lackluster musical score, it just seemed more like a giant searching game and less of an action game.

6 - Too many sliding sections with QTE platforming. I personally hated these types of "sections" in the GoW games and was always happy that there were just one or maybe two of them throughout the genuinely long playtime. Things like the chains in GoW III, or the bridge traversing in GoW II, I think it was. Ascension has a LOT of sliding sections where if you are a fraction of a second off on the button presses (if they didn't glitch and not show), you tumbled to your death. So instead of gameplay being extended by your need to develop strategies, the gameplay is extended as you need to rely on rote memorization of where the jumps and grapples, or even the QTE button sequences are, in order to survive.

7 - Lack of enemy variety. The enemies all seemed to be the same to me. The gorgons, in particular, look more like robots than they did in their past few games. Just "bleh."

8 - Lack of proper narration. The other games in the series always had a good narration going on, whether from off-screen narrators or on-screen NPCs, that helped you get the sense of where you were, why you were there, where you were going, and why you were going there. This game seemed to jump around a bit and the lack of iconic landmarks from real Greek mythology or Greece itself doesn't help.

9 - Not enough combat and too much platforming. This game was more like a platformer type game as opposed to an action game. I seemed to spend most of my time moving around from one area to another amongst all the short areas in the game instead of actually fighting enemies. Was not like what the previous games were.

10 - Absence of the "mini-game". Now I don't go and play GoW for sexual gratification, but the "mini-game" has been an in-joke of sorts in all games in the series and a trademark item. It's up there with the spiral staircases in terms of recognizable traits. The fact that it is absent in the game (while the staircase is present) just makes Ascension feel like it's missing something.

I mean, the game is a God of War game so I do enjoy playing it, but there's so much that seems to be missing (such as the Challenges) that I feel unfulfilled. I really hope that they just stop the series here with this one as it appears as if the developers are no longer interested in it and are just throwing things together and changing things that are already fine. I fear that another game, with MP again being the primary focus, would just hurt the series even more.

Did you try using the item you got from killing the boss? You have to use it to recreate the paths. I just got through this part last night.

I think the same thing happened to me. At that point in the game the camera got stuck and I could not move Kratos effectively. To resolve, I had to quite the game and load chapter 12 from the chapter select screen. I was able to play through the remainder of the game with no issues.

Gods of War is below all the previous GOW. Sony backing of 3D was missing and the game is stuck with 720P.
Sony new gimmick is to release 3D and higher resolution later. I am disappointed.

thats what i did. thanks yea this game feels cheap.

I agree with the "cheap" comment. Some reviews have been gushing how good the graphics are. I personally thought the graphics were sub par at best. In a number of cases this could have been easily confused as a PS2 game. Once again, I just played Tomb Raider before starting this game and the drop off in graphics quality was huge.

theres a scene with kratos onboard a ship. just look at the graphics and how cheapthe water looks. GOW2 looked better.

At no point does GoW 2 look like this game. Not even the cut scenes can compare. So the water isn't on Uncharted's level. Big deal. It still looks nothing like PS2 graphics. Lol.

Are you talking about the time restoring part? If so, you have to stop healing at a certain point so you can climb the broken pieces.

I don't think that's what's happening to him. This, sadly, sounds like one of the very well known bugs in the game. The only thing that can be redone is to quit the game (using the option in the select menu if you want), go back to the main menu, reload the game by using the chapter select from the profile menu, then re-start the chapter.

Restarting the last checkpoint seems to fix most of these. I've ran across 2 of these glitches, one on chapter 18 and the other 2 or 3 chapters later.