I was thinking of making a thread today myself since I had some questions on the combat.
I’m playing on the Challenging difficulty (the highest difficulty before you have to jump to the “Give me God of War” mode that apparently redesigns the game) and it is certainly challenging. All the things Alterity mentioned still hold true aside from the enraging thing, which sounds like it will force you to change your playstyle heavily from what I’ve been doing. But concerning just the Challenging difficulty, I’m not sure I feel like this is how I want to play the game.
The game seems to give you a ton of different options between your axe, your fists, you son, your spells, and the skill trees for all of them. And I feel like I keep finding new things you can do, like how having your son shoot an arrow at an airborne enemy or an enemy on the ground pops them up in the air for extending juggles. Or how important forcing enemies into the wall is, because the wall bounces provide extended combo opportunities as well as humongous amounts of stun. Or how you can kick frozen guys into walls to shatter them, or you can throw axes at people’s feet to trip them, or how to alternate between your own attacks and your son’s attacks to stunlock armored enemies, or how etc.
But because always pits you against a ton of enemies simultaneously and almost always one or two of them will be armored guys who are resistant to hitstun. The presence of those armored guys + high damage from the difficulty settings makes me feel like I can’t really risk using most of my moveset unless I want to get hit by someone in the middle of my attack animations. I’m mostly sticking to playing keepaway with that Reaver Cleaver or whatever attack, the move where you hold heavy attack and then do a cinematic axe chop that does a ton of damage and also gives you brief invincibility during the animation. It’s the safest way to get attacks on a big group of guys. All these other moves I have, like throwing my axe like a boomerang that stunlocks enemies for extended periods, or doing the running haymaker that can knock enemies back, or that move where you use your shield to trip a bunch of enemies, all feel like needless risks when an armored guy in the crowd will just power through it and punch you in the face, killing you in 1-3 hits.
When I wittle a group down to a single weak enemy I finally have space to explore the combatsystem a bit but that’s such a miniscule amount of time compared to the rest of the combat. Like, I’m still having a fine time with the combat and it’s certainly challenging and it’s fun figuring out how to get through these encounters alive but I don’t even know what to spend my XP on because I don’t feel like I have the opportunity to use most of my moves.
Any tips or tricks plz? Considering how many small details I keep finding about the combat system I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m just missing some crowd control strategy here.
As for the rest of the game: it’s fine. It’s suitable AAA action game design but it does a good enough job of keeping combat arena design varied in shape and size and enemy types, with some light puzzle solving mixed in every now and then.
If the game wasn’t called God of War and the Kratos was instead named Bob Godman I don’t think the game would radically different. It’s so divorced in design sensibilities and overall tone from the previous entries that it might as well be a new franchise.