Reviews// God of War: Ghost of Sparta (PSP)

This uncertainty seems to be part and parcel of God of War: Ghost of Sparta. I frequently found myself wondering what I was up to. Not where I was going, the levels are pretty linear in their design with hardly any branching at all. No, I was wondering what it was I was doing to advance the plot.

After leaving Atlantis Kratos must journey to Sparta, to do this he seems to have to slog it on foot through half of Ancient Greece, fighting random creatures along the way. I know Kratos isn't the sort to shy away from a fight, but being told my long lost, assumed dead, brother is being tortured in Death's Domain, would give me an incentive to walk around cities rather than fight my way through their labyrinthine streets and buildings. Maybe I'd even try to get a horse so I could get there faster.

Plot and motivation aside, the game plays much as you would expect from a God of War game. The template was laid down by David Jaffe back in 2005 and nobody has seen fit to change it much since then.

Blades on chains, chests with orbs, eyes and feathers, monsters killed by quick time events and hordes of foot soldiers who are dispatched with little to no effort are all in place. As are climbing using the blades, swinging on the blades' chains, beam balancing and swinging and sliding along conveniently strung ropes.

Sure, there are a few new weapons and artifacts to use and the "rage" ability has been replaced by an artifact-like power, but this is all so similar to what has gone on before. It's almost like developers Ready at Dawn just took their Chains of Olympus code, added some neat visual effects for the flashback sequences, tweaked the gameplay slightly and put in place as thin a story as possible to hang a game off.

Combine the uncertainty and "seen it all before" feeling with the PSP's controls and the limitations and compromises required to work around the lack of buttons and a second analogue nub and you have the least compelling game in the series.

Not to say that Ghost of Sparta is a bad game, but it's not as great as the previous entries in the series. Like I said earlier, perhaps I've been spoilt by the epic epicness of GoWIII, but Ghost of Sparta doesn't even seem to live up to Chains of Olympus, which I really enjoyed until the inevitable Hades cheap-death syndrome cropped up.

This entry in the series serves to fill in some gaps in Kratos' life, but they are gaps that weren't really crying out to be filled. To be honest, by the end, you come to realise that the gaps were actually crowbarred open in order to be filled by this game.

Conclusion
God of War: Ghost of Sparta is, to my mind, the least inspired and compelling entry in the series, but at this time of very few PSP releases, it's still worth getting if you like a bit of ancient world adventure on the move.

SPOnG Score: 78%