I didn’t like the combat but after mining its bones for a year it’s legitimately extremely well-done with next-level feedback. Shame that the health and special attack cooldowns are so misjudged.
Felix if you’re playing on hard like I was, note that basic attacks don’t interrupt enemies…but they do on normal. It’s an enormously important change towards defensive that isn’t really suited for first-time players.
yeah the game actually is much better after you get to the hub, damn it
they really shouldn’t let you toggle on hard mode before then or just make its effect invisible, it’s just lousy with the tools you have up to then
i feel like that was definitely my first mistake, yeah. ideal is probably to start at Balanced and switch up to Challenge once you get in that far, and only start a GMGoW run once you have some idea of which abilities you want to aim for. otherwise the early story/gameplay pacing is just horrendously out of whack
Wow this little phrase encapsulates so much
ugh I can’t believe it’s good now
why! why couldn’t they have debuffed every enemy’s health by 50% up to that point and trimmed the early sequence by almost as much if they just wanted to teach you the basics before giving you actual options
Yeah, the reasoning behind the health pools is that it gives space for the stun meter and all the state applications to play a role; finish a light chain and you get the knockback swing, push characters into each other for a big stun boost, attack characters against a wall, on the ground, or in the air for a bigger stun boost, perform the finisher for a huge stun boost on nearby enemies, increasing momentum.
But if you’re not gaining momentum (or it’s unclear what the game’s expectations are), it feels like you’re in the land of chip damage.
FWIW this was one of the 10 games on my list of games to play in 2019 (which in a massive upset I actually completed) and I liked it the best of the bunch, and that list had games like Planescape: Torment, Stephen’s Sausage Roll and Gunstar Heroes on it. It even had Flashback!
…Okay let’s just forget about that one.
Anyways, beyond being another example as to how I may be the target audience for big budget middlebrow stuff it’s just really well put together in a way that is uncommon in games of its ilk even as it borrows a lot from them. I am happy to have one game grab all those AAA ideas and do them really well so that I can just play that one if need be. I am happy to have a game with really solid combat and not one ounce of Platinum in it. I am happy to have a game toss way overleveled enemies at me that I can come back to later or smash my head against as a way to basically manage my own difficulty level. I’m happy to have one stupidly powerful secret boss that took me Souls level of time and effort to crack.
…I wish the story was a bit better at times and didn’t have a few absurd pacing issues, but it is a God of War game and is so much less disastrously awful than every other story they’ve tried to tell that I feel I should at least give them credit for improvement.
So yeah, very much an AAA game but I’ll stan for it being one of the better crafted ones of recent times.
yeah I’m really loving it now that I have actual combat options and diverse scenery, I can’t believe I quit the damn game twice in what couldn’t have been more than the first couple hours and it turned out to be worthwhile after that
Can’t believe this Anime Betrayal.
my wife says “thank you for playing it in French, not sure I could stand it being on otherwise”
please hate it again felix
I need you to hate it again
what a fucking arc
petition to rename this thread “Felix SUCKS… or does he???”
Yeah, this mirrors my experience. I had no idea normal attacks recoiled enemies on the regular difficulty. That’s wild. The thing that annoyed me the most in the first segment of the game on Hard was it didn’t feel like there was a good way to deal with the heavy enemies. You aren’t given the tools to stun them, and coupled with the numerous other enemies there just wasn’t any breathing room to use any of your moves and the experience became stifling and claustrophobic. It was safer to to do a couple of slashes and then dodge, and you can only do that so many times before it gets old.
Though now that I think about it I think I ended up relying almost completely on that one axe strike that takes a while to charge and ends with a kick because you’re invincible during the canned animation. But everything did change once I hate the lake and I turned around on the game. The combat is very much about controlling the crowd with recoils and stuns so you can focus on dealing damage on something in particular. The arena shapes get somewhat more varied as do the enemy arrangements, and your toolset becomes robust enough that you can mold your playstyle into the system. However some of the more difficult enemies can only get recoiled by very, very slow moves or not at all by normal means so I had to find other solutions to deal with them.
I heard God Men Going their Own Way (GMGOW) difficulty’s main difference is that enemies will go up one level after a period of time unless you’re recoiling/stunning them. That sounds more annoying than hard but maybe I played more defensively than most people.
yeah you gotta poke everything for the first bit or risk having to start very long and uninteresting combats over, it’s a very strange way to introduce a game that is primarily about interesting variations on crowd control
That heavy draugr fight in the courtyard took me an hour and almost repelled me.
Then the poison witches they introduce immediately after are just unconscionable
I think I switched the difficulty down and back up again twice during the opening hours. I’m curious how a game with that much work hours and polish put into it arrives at an introduction this frustrating.
I was all set to say how one of the best things about this game which is very Old Brawler Energy is how many opportunities you get to try to fling monsters off the stage rather than have to finish them off and then they just gave me an elevator stage which was all about that
no way around it, game is good
though it’s also the first thing in a while where I find myself frequently mixing up the button combination I meant to press in the heat of battle, they’re into some banjo kazooie shit with this moveset
starting to reach the point of being awed by just how diverting this is
it could just be the french dub but kratos and his son have more amicable, funny chemistry than I was led to believe, the supporting cast and all the different areas are all pretty interesting once you finally make your way to them, and for being one Objectively Very Long Uninterrupted Journey it’s really easy to pick up and play for 20-30 minutes at a time, which addresses pretty well all of my initial complaints, and it has such easygoing friction and so many fun tertiary systems for a linear game that isn’t in your face about side quests, so that’s pretty much all of my complaints addressed.
I still think those first two hours are total garbage but for $20 it’s pretty much a no-brainer