Reviews// God of War II (PS2)

God of War II plays in much the same way as the original game, with you controlling Kratos in a third-person point of view and slinging your blades around on the end of chains in order to dispatch your foes. Some foes can be defeated with elaborate finishing moves that take the form of quick response mini-games where you must press the correct buttons or move the analog stick in the correct motions in order to enact bloody violence upon your foe. Using these finishing moves is often required, but many times they are just fun ways to finish off your foes, also they usually give you more experience orbs than a normal killing would do.

Experience orbs, coloured red, can be used to power up your weapons and magical abilities. You can gain them by killing enemies, smashing furniture or opening the red chests that are scattered around the game. There are also green and blue chests around that release similarly coloured orbs; green for health and blue for magical power. In addition, there are colourless chests that can contain Gorgon eyes, which will increase your maximum health, and Phoenix feathers that do the same for your magical power. Other chests contain yellow orbs that will power up your Rage of the Titans meter.

Rage of the Titans works in a similar way to the Rage of the Gods ability in the first game. Your attacks are made more damaging while the ability is activated. Unlike the first game, you can stop the power from being active at any time, allowing you to marshal your rage and use it in short busts when it's most effective. Your rage meter will fill up as you kill enemies in sync with the amount of hits you chain together into your attacks; collecting the yellow orbs from chests also fills your rage meter.

There is very little to fault about God of War II. As with the first game, the gameplay is very well balanced; enemies attack in the right numbers so that you feel threatened, but not so many as to make battles feel tedious. They also exhibit reasonable levels of intelligence, working together to try and bring you down. Puzzles are logical and usually require only a little bit of lateral thought to solve.

The only place that the game engine can become irritating is in that old bugbear of this type of game - the camera. You have no control over the camera whatsoever, because the right analog stick is used for dodging, and the camera angles presented to you can sometimes be sub-optimal. The camera seems to be positioned to show off the scenery more than it shows off the action. There are also scattered spots in the game where the camera re-orientation is so confusing that you can end up heading back the way you came without realising it.

However, these are minor faults in an otherwise excellent tour-de-force of the video game arts. SCEA Santa Monica has a property on its hands that can run and run. There will always be more quests for Kratos if Sony wishes to prolong the series beyond the currently planned main trilogy; and as long as the quality is kept as high as the first two games, I'll be there playing them.

SPOnG Score: 94%

God of War II is possibly the last great exclusive game for the PS2, if you own a PS2 or a PS3, you owe it to yourself to play this game. If you have never played the first God of War game, get that too, what have you been playing instead?