God of War III Demo Impressions

This month Qore let it’s subscribers have an advanced look at God of War 3 by releasing the E3 2009 demo as a free download.

The demo opens up really nicely. Transferring straight from the title screen you see above, to some skeleton type creatures running towards Kratos, no loading screen or blackout. It’s a very smooth transition and a cool effect.

The controls, as far as I can tell (I have very little experience with the GoW series), are exactly the same as they were in GoWII or the PSP game, Chains of Olympus. Square for light attacks, Triangle for heavy. The combos are flashy, with Kratos spinning his Blades of Chaos around like a kid on YouTube trying to show off. I have to admit though, the combat get’s repetitive very quickly. If you didn’t like it before than GoWIII won’t do a think to change that.

You do get a bow and arrow as well as a large, stone boxing glove type thing, which spicing the combat up a bit. I’m sure there’s more depth to the fighting if you want to memorize lengthy combo’s but for the casual player there’s a lot of repetition.

The graphics however are top notch. It’s hard to compare them to games like Uncharted 2 though, due to the very different aesthetics. The lighting ticks me off a bit though, I don’t usually need to fidget with brightness settings, but on the default brightness there were 3 or 4 areas where the path I needed to take was so dark I couldn’t tell there was a path there at all.

Granted the demo was very short, maybe 10 minutes, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Bad combat, bad lighting and a bad sense of direction, there was a few parts where I had no clue what to do.

Companies often think that putting out demos builds anticipation for a game, put’s it in the front of people’s minds. But a bad demo can just as easily turn people off of your game.