Santa Monica Studios

In Vaishnavism, a fallen God (or deity) is descended from divination due to betrayal. These are themes that are manipulated and used masterfully within the story and arc of Kratos within this game. Despite all the problems I have with this game and the previous title. This game conceptually is great and shows the skills and risk factors that Santa Monica was willing to go through to show the true potential of their engines and the PlayStation 2. However to understand the basis on which these engines excel, and at times falter, we must analyze the content that they hold. These are the combat and visuals.

The combat is still purely based on the original move sets with different weapons. The main ones within the second are the Blades of Athena, Spear of Destiny, and the barbarian hammer. The Blades of Athena, are divinely imbued versions of the chaos blades, with Ahtena being the basis of that power. It gives off a golden streak animation, and personally, my favorite version of these in the entire series. One however that you get post-game is the Blade of Olympus. This absolute unit of a blade gives off a nice, teal light, and let me tell you, this is one of the reasons why I played this game’s new game plus. These weapons have so much potential within their design and combos, and they substantiate this design quality. Another big part of this game that makes my love for this game even more vigorous is the puzzles. Even though there were puzzles in the previous game, it was very inadequate and more of a way to break up the combat, which is a contention to its naivete. However, this game combines the combat and the structure of gameplay to conduct the challenge of those puzzles, while also not feeling as choppy or immersion-breaking as the first God of War. Reddit User Belfalor states that the difficulty of the game seems to be a little unfair.

“It may be worth noting that I’m playing on God Mode, but to be honest, it’s not that difficult. The combat is still manageable, enemies can be a bit tough at times but otherwise all fine.” They then illustrate, “When I say “needlessly difficult” I mean the level design, at times, the awful hitboxes ( died so many times because some guy’s weapon reaches me even though I’m not touching it.”

The visuals of the game are up there with the visual fidelity of Kingdom Hearts 2 and most late-generation PS2 titles. The colors are fairly neutral with great usages of brighter colors and avoid brown and red assets that the first had kind of spearheaded into. The biggest factor within the visuals is the CGI cutscenes which show beautiful, light colors with a nice semi-realistic and semi-classical take on Greco-Roman art. R/GodOfWar Admin RDDAMAN819 believes that even with the superannuated hardware, it rivaled the first gen PS3 consoles.

“I played through the series for the first time and was shocked to find out GOW2 came out in 2007. Other games at that time like Uncharted 1, COD4, and Assassins Creed looked a lot better,” they postulated by saying, “Obviously this is all tied to the strange decision to release it on PS2 and not PS3. It could’ve been a huge console seller back then. I know things were a lot different then, but in today’s market it would certainly have been a PS3 day one exclusive.”

Overall, the flaws are truly refuted by the advancements of this game and even overshadowing past and future titles. To be honest, I am excited for the third title!