3/5 ★ – KHFanXIII's review of God of War: Ascension.

God of War Ascension as a follow up is something that was never going to be able live up to the heights of God of War 3, and that's okay. But can it still manage to be at least as good as some of the other entries? Ehh..it's okay. I'll get the story out of the way first. It's just okay. The way it was told though is weird. It flashes back and forth between the present and the past and makes it a little hard to follow. It's not bad, but I kept constantly asking myself "does this story need to be told?". The story of this game just felt kind of superfluous. Okay, getting to the gameplay. Despite being the 6th game in the series, it actually does feel different, but not necessarily better. They added this rage meter, which unlike the Rage of the Gods/Titans in previous games, doesn't put you in a hyper armor or invincible mode with enhanced attacks and damage, in Ascension it works differently. The rage meter in this game instead unlocks combos and attacks that you previously just start with (or at least can unlock via upgrading) in the past games. I don't really like this change as it makes me feel like I have a lot less options in combat. The meter also immediately drains outside of combat, and will also drain if you get hit, meaning you rarely ever have access to your bread and butter combos from other games. The rage meter *does* also come with a super move which I actually do like (well, for the Souls of Hades element at least). Something else I'd like to nitpick is sometimes during combat, the camera will zoom way out to be cinematic, but I dunno if this is due to the lower resolution of this game compared to the GoW 3 remaster, but I had a hard time even seeing what to do when this happened. I usually just jumped around and dodged until the camera zoomed back in. Speaking of the God of War III remaster, despite going from that game to this one, the graphical fidelity of this game is still really high (which makes sense for late PS3 game), the framerate is wonky tho. It seems to be unlocked, but it never hits 60fps as far as I can tell, which was a little hard to get used to after playing all of the other games at 60fps. In the middle of the game, you get this Amulet of Uroburos and it is super fun to use. It allows you to freeze enemies and slow them down in combat, as well as being able to manipulate time to decay and heal objects for puzzles. This was a cool as hell mechanic and actually really loved the puzzles in the game because of this. Something I'd like to bring up is, you can definitely tell this is a God of War game made in a post-Uncharted world. A lot of games (especially Sony big budget ones) released after Uncharted started to implement elements of those games, and you can definitely feel that influence in Ascension. The combat in general, is somewhat wonky compared to other games due to the rage meter changes, as well as more of a focus on blocking and dodging than other games, making this feel a little less fun. Overall, this game isn't bad, it definitely has some really neat things, but it feels dragged down by changes to combat which makes the overall game just feel not as fun.