2.5/5 ★ – KQSpidey's review of God of War: Ascension.

In terms of the fun I had at the controller, God of War Ascension is my favorite of the mainline God of War games pre-reboot, only because it offers the least resistance to the player. It's a straight shot to the end that's shorter than its three predecessors, the puzzles are more immediately obvious, and even the secrets are placed in more conspicuous locations. I recognize the goal of prior God of War games was to provide a grand scope and heavy challenge, but neither of those things are what I'm interested in going back to play. I'll be honest: the hack-and-slash gameplay that I can perform mindlessly while listening to podcasts is what draws me to these games; and Ascension has almost exclusively that to offer. I put God of War III Remastered down for months to do other things and play other games before finally returning out of some sense of obligation to my backlog. I bought Ascension for $9.99 on PSN and beat it in less time than it took to download and install the full game with my PS3 Slim's painfully senile processing capability. (and that was on a wired connection! seriously, I feel like we don't talk enough about just how slow those things were/are...) However, the remastered versions of the PSP God of War titles, also available on PS3, are still my go-to for classic God of War, because their design isn't so drab. It's clear that Ascension was meant to be a Very Pretty Game, showing off just how Real and Graphics-y the PS3 could be near the end of its life, and it achieves that... to its own great detriment. The grand cartoonishness of the prior games is eschewed for grey and tan flatness; the hyperbolically sexual blood-and-gutsy juvenility is replaced by tonally off-putting body horror. Ascension is equally sex-obsessed, equally filled to the brim with creature meat, and infinitely more gross about both of those things than every other of Kratos' carnal kill-a-thons.