God of War 2 Review

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Developer: SCE Santa Monica Studios
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment/Capcom
Platform: PS2, PS3
Multiplayer: No
Replay value: Low

IGN ranked this as the 2nd best ps2 game of all time and other sites and magazines have ranked it as high as 1. After playing through the first and hearing spidey's opinions of it, i was pretty stoked to play this game. This contains God of War 1 spoilers.

Story
This takes up some time after the first game. After killing Aries and taking his throne as the new god of war, kratos gets in the habit of overseeing battles and then coming down to earth at the end to sack the city. The gods of olympus start turning their back to Kratos until they can no longer ignore it. Athena and Zeus trick Kratos into releasing his godlike powers into a sword and Zeus sends him to hades. Coming to Kratos's rescue is the Titan Gaia, who saves Kratos from hades and tells him about the sister's of fate. The sister's of fate control time and if Kratos was to find them, he could go back in time to when Zeus tricked him and kill Zeus. Your one and only goal in this game is to find the island that no one has ever found and use the sister's powers. And finally have an epic showdown with the god himself, Zeus. The story is very well written and as the first game gave good background information on Kratos, this game gives some great background information on the Gods of olympus and the Titans

Gameplay
The general gameplay hasn't changed but a few new things have been added. You have basically the same spells as the first game just given different names to match your new found Titans alliance rather then the Gods alliance you had in the first game. Something i really liked was the added items you obtain throughout the game such as the Golden Fleece which blocks any attack and sends it back to the caster and the Icarus Wings which lets you glide using legit wings. In the way of puzzles, I did find it a little disappointing and felt GOW1's puzzles were much more challenging. Where GOW2 lack in puzzles it makes up for it boss fights. In GOW 1 you had 3 main boss fights, 1 in the beginning 1 in the middle and 1 at the end. In GOW2 theres plenty of boss fights to go around and all have some historical reference, either in greek mythology like Perseus and Theseus or in GOW history like the Barbarian King. One thing i did find weird about the boss fights is they got rid of the boss's health bar, so your just hitting him with no clue of what his health is. After completing the game there is a Challenge of the Titans mode. Very similar to GOW1's Challenge of the Gods but these you can play at any time rather then having to play all challenges in one sitting. One thing that i love about these first 2 games are the maps. It's just beautifully designed to where you'll spend hours in one area and wind up in an area you've already previously been but now have the tools to move on. Also the pure scope of how massive the Titans are is very impressive and really tells you how powerful the Gods are since they won the war over these massive beasts.

Final Thoughts
God of War 2 is a very good game and improved from the first one by adding little things here and there. Yet i feel all the praise of this game is a little overrated. The ending isn't as satisfying as you would hope for because like most 2nd games its a transition from game 1 and game 3. But i do have to say the replay value on this game for me is low.

Score: 9/10