Reviews// God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP)

Chains of Olympus is an incredible technical achievement. The PS2 games were exceptional, making full use of the hardware, looking great and playing extremely well. Here we have a very similar game squeezed onto the PSP with the only concessions to the format being a reduced playing time and slightly altered controls.

The graphics are easily on a par with the the earlier games with lighting, reflections and animations all seemingly taken en masse from the PS2 and somehow squeezed onto a UMD with barely a fifth of the storage space. Chains of Olympus makes use of the full speed of the PSP's CPU, running at 333MHz instead of the previous limit of 222MHz, and it shows.

The music and sound effects are great too, although their effect is lessened by being played through the PSP's speakers. You really get the sense that the software is being let down a bit by the hardware and that the music would sound so much better if you could play it through a decent sound system.

The story is interesting, if short, filling in the blanks of some of the events of the other games. For example, you'll find out why Atlas was so grumpy when you met him in God of War II.

Unfortunately, not everything is Elysium-like here, there's a bit of Tartarus thrown in too.

For starters, the controls; dodging is a central mechanic in the God of War games, you have to be able to leap around and attack your enemies as fluidly as possible. The PS2 games made use of the right analogue stick for dodging, the PSP doesn't have this option, so you have to hold down both shoulder buttons and use the analogue nub. This makes it a bit tricky to swap between combat and dodging, leading to a few too many deaths in some of the larger fights.

Speaking of the fights, there's quite a steep learning curve that goes on through the game. Most of the time you'll be proceeding as you think you should do, but about half way through, the designers apparently decided that the game wasn't difficult enough so they started racking up the numbers of enemies and repeating fights with the addition of environmental hazards too.

However, the worst part of the game is that it feels like a collection of ideas from the cutting room floors of the other two games. Elevator room with swarms of enemies? Check! Trip to Hades with as many cheap deaths as possible? Check! Underwater sequence with artefact to enable you to breathe? Check! Timed race along a corridor while a spiked wall chases you? Check! Puzzles based around reflecting light to open up new areas? Check! And of course, the interactive cut-scenes raise their time-worn heads again.

There is a difference between capturing the spirit of previous games in the series and just re-arranging existing pieces to make a new one.

None the less, God of War: Chains of Olympus is one of the best games currently available for the PSP. It's an almost perfect re-creation of the PS2 games and that's not a bad thing at all. Now, where's the PS3 version?

SPOnG Score: 87%

Conclusion
A technical tour-de-force, Chains of Olympus is a worthy addition to the God of War franchise and sits atop the PSP's software library like an omnipotent God, I just wish it didn't feel like I'd played it all before.