God Of War: Chains of Olympus Demo Impressions

I did a preview last week on God of War: Chains Of Olympus and this week I was lucky enough to receive in the mail (thanks Kris!) The G.O.W. Demo from Sony. Amusingly enough it wasn’t myself that got to play the demo first but my girlfriend, and judging from her screams of anger in the other room, I could tell that the God of War franchise had been well translated over to the PSP. The demo starts off in the city of Attica, Kratos leaps into the city without any prior explanation as to why he is there. We do know however that since this game is a prequel to God of War I, Kratos is still under his oath to the God’s as their willing champion and a tool at their disposal. The demo follows the traditional God of War formula we all know and love: Triangle for heavy attacks, square for light attacks, circle for grab, and x for jump. The L and R buttons are used for magic attacks and dodging moves.

Also as expected there are button pressing minigames during the boss fights, where you must quickly press the button that flashes on the screen to make Kratos do some spectacular attack. As you proceed through the first level you can’t help but take in the scenery, judging from screen shots I knew the game looked good, but I didn’t think it would be indistinguishable from it’s PS2 kindred. The first level takes place during a battle between Persia and the Greeks, a Basilisk monster (that looks like something straight out of the Cloverfield movie) stomping about killing who he pleases. Kratos’ morals also don’t seem any less cold as he runs through the levels killing Greek and Persian alike. The first boss fight is between you and the Basilisk’s head, you must dodge a couple bite attacks and fireballs between hitting him, not a difficult boss fight and after 2/3rds of his life are gone the minigame takes care of the rest of it. He runs away from you however and you must race after him through the city.

Eventually you meet up with the Persian king, who is also a pretty easy fight, just stay at long range and keep his respawning henchmen off your back and he goes down in about 2 minutes. You also acquire his magic power called “Efreet Magic” which is an area of effect fireblast. After this its only a couple minutes before the demo abruptly and unexpectedly ends. This demo really does it’s job and that is to show you that the developers are delivering on their promise of staying true to the GOW standards, and it wets your appetite to play more, this game instantly made me want to go out and buy a PS2 and the first 2 GOW games again. There isn’t much revealed as far as story goes, only that Kratos is a zealous servant of the gods, and that he is still a pretty awesome anti-hero. The only complaint I had with the demo is a small one, the dodge move is hard to pull off sometimes and it’s definitely one that should be easy to do.

God Of War: Chains of Olympus is certainly shaping up to be a best seller game and should also sell a lot of PSPs, I think sony should market a God of War PSP for the release but hey I’m not in their marketing department. Get ready for Kratos’ return March 4th 2008.