Razilez wrote:Great review there Thongings, and just ignore those who look at the score and nothing more.
Would you say it's your favourite game in the series? Just completed GoW I recently and was a great game, but I did find it tedious in many parts. Same goes for GoW II actually, so I'm hoping it isn't needlessly tedious. Does the game have more story/cutscenes? That's one of the things I loved about the other games, but they were few and far between. Hoping for more story in this title.
Hmm, it's a tricky one. I mean, I think it's generally a 'better' game than its predecessors, the combat's tighter and the controls have been tweaked into a much better layout for flicking between weapons and spells. The only thing the others have on it, for definite, is that it's pretty short in comparison. If I remember rightly anyway, I & II were both around 15 hours, whereas I clocked III in a comfortable 10.
Having said that, I can't rate it in a bubble against just its forebears. The platforming's still dreadful, and it almost stubbornly refuses to break from its template, even though it has some great ideas, it gives them up far too quickly. I would have liked to have seen them try more on that front. The combat is great and brilliantly satisfying, but it expands to a point and then kind of... stays there. I just don't think it pushes itself as much as it should do.
I got a lot of stick because I gave Bayonetta a 10/10 and this an 8, and I know a lot of people will disagree with me on it. That's fine, but it's something I stand by. I'm constantly discovering things about Bayonetta's combat, and it would shake things up quite often just to keep the game fresh.
Thing is... I'd hesitate to call myself an 'expert', but if I had a 'specialty' as such, I would say I'm very well versed on action adventure hacknslash. So I'm always very interested in exploring the nuances of combat, so I'm perhaps a little more critical than many on it. I can often get prickly about people calling a lot of hacknslash games 'button-mashers' because, while I know that you can operate to a reasonable degree of success there, it's not until you really explore it that you find out what you can do. Bump up the difficulty on Bayo or GoWIII and I'd like to see you button-mash your way through it!
Oh, I've gone off on one there! Sorry about that. Point is, while GoWIII definitely has much more depth and breadth to it than a lot of people would give it credit for, for me, it doesn't quite do enough. Ultimately, I think I'd find it hard to argue about people calling this the 'best' entry, I think I'll alwsy have fondest memories of the second one, though, to be honest.
Plus, this is the first game in the series that I've really started to tire of Kratos as a character, there's a fine line between furious anti-hero and unsympathetic, murderous cuntflap. Falls on the latter side far too much in III for my taste.