God of War: Ghost of Sparta

A narrativa é mais humana que a média da série e expande de maneira relevante o universo da franquia. Pontos para vários cenários bem interessantes também.

Em termos de gameplay, assim como o Chains of Olympus, não tem nada de muito novo e é mais fácil do que deveria.

There's something that's difficult to narrow down about the God of War PSP games and their relation to each other. They both have a lot of the same issues, yet also have strengths over each other. It makes it difficult to say which one is actually better, as they both do some things fairly well and some things pretty poorly. Ghost of Sparta picks up a lot of the problems that Chains of Olympus had with its presentation, but unfortunately distributes all new gameplay issues.

In terms of gameplay, Ghost of Sparta actually does add a mechanic over Chains of Olympus, and this mechanic somehow manages to both enhance and degrade the games quality. In place of the classic rage mechanic, and replacing God of War III's item mechanic, you can now imbue your attacks with fire, doing extra damage and opening up new areas. On paper, this sounds like it could only be an improvement. The issue, however, is with the controls. The problem with introducing feature creep into handheld titles, is that you might not actually have enough room on the device itself to map everything. The imbue feature takes the place of the R button, where magic resided in Chains of Olympus. So, to make up for this, all magic spells are now mapped to the D-pad. From the very first spell you cast, this is immediately a noticeable problem, as you have to take your thumb off the analog stick just to cast a spell. In a game where mobility is so important, moving your thumb for just a second can result in disaster. You would assume that in the PS3 Origin Collection, this issue could be fixed by utilizing the L2 and R2 buttons, but this remains untouched.

The spells themselves might be some of the weakest in the franchise, as well. There's no true AoE or hard crowd control. So on top of the spells being difficult to actually cast, they're not particularly worth casting in the first place. It's not all doom and gloom, though. This time around, you get Kratos' original spear and shield as a subweapon. You can throw the spear, and the shield is fun to use. It gives you that classic historically accurate spartan feel. Only you're still Kratos, so you still go overkill on everything. Yeah, it's still God of War, and with the terribly sad exception of the spell system, the rest of the combat works just fine. It's worth noting however, that the wraiths, which were already one of the most painful enemies to deal with, have only gotten worse, and are borderline overpowered. They're not a fun time.

What Ghost of Sparta does do better than Chains of Olympus, though, is the overall presentation and storytelling. You visit Atlantis, the city of Sparta itself, the domain of death, and other various locales. They're obviously not on the level of any God of War III environments, but they do the job just fine. There was rarely a point where I was bored by what I was looking at. Although, this is the third game where you start on a ship and have to kill a multi-limbed sea creature. So that's something. The story is much, much better than Chains of Olympus. It actually clears up a plot point in God of War III, and there's no vanishing antagonists like what we've seen before. The ending actually might even emotionally touch you, or at least come as close as a God of War game can come.

Really, Ghost of Sparta is hard to properly grade. It's a worse game than Chains of Olympus, but a better cinematic experience. It doesn't feel like a total waste of time, which is good, and even if it's not the best, it's short enough to not feel too overbearing. You could peacefully skip it without feeling robbed of any real meaningful content. Still, as a supplemental piece, you can enjoy it to a fair degree. Compared to other franchises making the jump from home console to handheld, God of War keeps a reasonable level of quality overall, and it's still admirable how close to the originals the PSP games shoot for.

The PSP had a ton of bad games on it from big franchises, remember when Resistance and Final Fantasy came to PSP. God of War had 2 PSP games, and both were kind of bland. This was later released as an HD collection on PS3 which I got for free when I bought a controller at Gamestop. Its just boring, forgettable, and nothing stands out, the boss fights are dull, the combat is dull, the story is dull, it just plays like a typical hack n slash. The abilities in this are also kind of boring. Hell its a the very definition of a cash grab that just used the God of War name to try to make a few quick bucks by making a lazy and unoriginal sequel.

Its a decent action adventure game, that can be beaten in 5 hours. It has many of the cliches of the series, but what bothered me the most is the overly linear level design and how easy the game is. I never died from combat, though i played on normal difficulty. The level design is so bad that they leave actual secrets in the corridors you have to walkthrough in plain sight. That said, it features a decent story and nice visual direction.

I can only really recommend this to absolute fans of the series, and even then this is a clear step down from the rest. It covers a bit of the unresolved plot holes in Kratos history, but its a pretty unremarkable game.