God of War : Ascension review

Formats: PlayStation 3
Developer: Santa Monica Studio
Publisher: Sony
Age rating: PEGI 18
Released: 15 March 2013

At a time of increasing complexity in interactive storytelling and a broadening of the kind of experiences we expect games to deliver, God Of War – and it’s truck-throated protagonist in particular – are like an old-fashioned punch to the windpipe. Kratos the furious demi-god, a man defined by violence and psychologically jammed in that moment of aggressive self-belief right before a post-pub headbutt, is a wilfully unpleasant protagonist indistinguishable, dramatically speaking, from controlling a tightly balled fist through ancient Greece. It goes without saying that it’s great to have him back.
God Of War: Ascension is a prequel, hardly surprising if you consider that by the end of the God Of War III Kratos had skewered the gods of Olympus in turn like a rack of mythic barbeque ribs. “Who will he kill now?” was the obvious question, the answer now revealed to be “The past”. Ascension, then, takes place during Kratos’ service to the god of war, Ares, which is more or less irrelevant except it means that Kratos already has his defining chain weapon, the Blades of Chaos.
This is important because it’s the Blades more even than Kratos’ swaggering urge to invite the world to take it outside that define God Of War’s slick, distinctive combat. This is, sensibly, unchanged at least on the level of being able to swing firey chains about in thumping, destructive arcs. It still has the swishing quickness, the easy combos, and that sense of unsettling power that playing as a man who has the ashen remains of his murdered family bonded to his skin on a cellular level really should have.
Beneath this surface familiarity there are changes, essentially of the sort that any series instalment has to deliver to justify being a game at all. Kratos now has a whipped grapple that fixes enemies in place, or slings them skittling into crowds, or if they’re weakened triggers rending finishing moves that are as gratuitous as they are characteristically God Of War. He can also pick up enemy weapons – swords, spears, swing-for-the-bleachers hammers – that can be integrated with his existing combo sets, which adds variety, power and potentially range. And, where God Of War III had Kratos inheriting different weapons from the Olympians he forcibly ushered to heaven, here his Blades are imbued with different elemental powers – ice, electricity, and an ability to summon a big hand from the underworld (admittedly not an element at all) – which can be switched mid-fight but have less of a impact on the shape of battles.
These relatively underwhelming tweaks mean that the biggest change to the character of Ascension’s combat comes from the fact it’s now more dominated by brutal, semi-automated finishing sequences than before. Truly giant boss battles – the technically wowing kind that reduce Kratos to a pale speck meting out flesh-busting punishment in miniature while a rock-skinned Titan grinds hugely in the foreground – are few are far between, but mini-bosses are the new order of the day. Chimera of various kinds – elephant-men, snake-women, actual chimera, goats with swords – arrive regularly and demand bespoke gutting, skull-stoving and otherwise dismembering, often imaginatively using part of themselves. The effect is spectacular but also, eventually, flattening, each climax depending on an essentially identical stab-and-dodge mechanic so that soon they’re not really climaxes at all, and the only hook is seeing how the monsters are going to be turned inside out.
More successful in varying the pace are the game’s puzzles – never a prominent feature, but then Kratos has always seemed as likely to eat a crossword as patiently solve one – and the improved climbing. Kratos’ ledge-holding and grapple-swinging has been expanded so that it feels like a slightly stiffer Uncharted, a backhanded compliment that really is a compliment, especially when these swing-and-leap sections are strung together with Kratos’ new surface-surfing ability for intense, extended, one-slip-means-death traversal.
While these sequences are full of momentum and purposeful direction, Ascension’s biggest problem is that its story lacks either. The through-line of God Of War is that the mortal Kratos doesn’t just defy the gods but screams and stabs them until he gets his way. In each of the previous full-sized games Kratos is set in fatal opposition to a deity, the end goal being to give them a godly offing. Ascension is less direct and consequently less compelling,
No doubt the prequel setting is the issue, restricting the game to a fixed final destination, but the bigger question is: why? Why not call this God Of War IV and re-alive everybody so they can be killed again with better graphics? Presumably the answer is that a full sequel is being saved for PS4, but that could just as easily have been God Of War V. It’s not as though they are running short of numbers, even old-fashioned Roman ones.
One area in which Ascension goes further than any of its predecessors is online multiplayer. As far as possible this takes the third-person combat from the single-player game and sets it in a competitive context, giving us an arena brawler with a Greek flavour and upgradable hats. Significant tweaking has been done to refit the combat for balanced player-on-player bouts – where Kratos is a grunting priority-hog, much of his perceived power coming from the relative speed and strength of his attacks, to make multiplayer feasible a new system of parries and unblockable specials has been devised.
The result is that, in one-on-one fights especially, the system works, manifesting as a dance of dodges and tactfully unleashed specials that feels determined by skill rather than hack-slashing. That is, until you’re outnumbered, at which point any fight feels like a foregone, hail-of-blows conclusion, although game types that favour strategy over straightforward brawling – capture the flag, hold the bases – make this less of an issue.
This leaves Ascension as a highly-accomplished if not completely fulfilling rampage. There’s a base level of quality that hasn’t slipped from the excellent God Of War III – this looks even better, puts things onscreen that are, somehow, even bigger. But this technical muscle isn’t given the best stage on which to oil and flex, thanks to a story that simply idles the roaring engine of death that is Kratos, and keeps the series ticking over until the next, more substantial step forward.