The New God of War Is Caught Between Realms

Can a videogame serve as an effective apology?

I'm not necessarily thinking in terms of, like, Ken Levine forgetting his wife's birthday and apologizing by creating a videogame that serves as a deconstruction of birthdays and the very nature of regret.

It's unfair and reductive to say that the new God of War, a distant sequel to the series of hack-and-slash action games that dominated the PS2 and PS3 about a decade ago, is simply an apology for those famously bloody games. It's a profoundly well-made game, a labor of great effort and passion, thoughtful and elegiac and deeply interested in important questions.

But it is, in many ways, an attempt to grapple with the complicated legacy of the original series (defined here as the three main games released for the PlayStation consoles, and not including the weirdo subtitled side games). The God of War series was a genuine phenomenon at the time the games were released - God of War is the 11th-best selling game in the history of the PS2, God of War 2 was the 14th-best seller and God of War 3 sold more than five million copies.

Still, for all the sales and all the acclaim, God of War had mostly faded from the critical conversation. There was a sense that the games represented a kind of evolutionary dead end - epic scale hack-and-slash action games that refined and perfected the form without leaving much room for future development. Dante's Inferno is what you get when you try and iterate from God of War, and that illustrates the point nicely.

But there was also a sense that God of War epitomized an immature, rather embarrassing era in gaming. The original three games weren't just bloody - they were gleefully vicious, glorifying in brutality and lingering on lovingly rendered images of over-the-top violence. And the obligatory sex mini-games in each entry were particularly effective at inducing eye rolling.

2018's simply titled God of War tries to avoid all of those sins. It makes a number of core gameplay changes to enhance the depth and breadth of the experience and works hard to create a mature, thoughtful narrative. Nothing in the game fails - every element is polished to a glimmering sheen and mostly works well enough. But too many of them feel awkwardly grafted on to a property with which they don't naturally fit, and you can see the seams. And those seams are enough to keep the game from reaching greatness.

Take, for example, the game's foray into open world exploration. The original games were essentially linear experiences, with some occasional opportunities for Kratos to wonder off on a hidden path and find some collectible or power up. But God of War takes Kratos out of his traditional Greek environment and plunks him - and his son Atreus - into the Scandinavian countryside, where there's much more room for side quests, collectible hunts, exploration and the usual open world flotsam.

There's no doubt this new landscape is gorgeously rendered, and there's a lot of pleasure in simply wandering around and admiring the scenery. But the open world element of God of War feels almost obligatory, as though you simply can't make a big, ambitious AAA game these day without open world exploration. For all the effort developer SIE Santa Monica Studio put into crafting the look of the open world, there was seemingly little thought as to how that world fit with the way the characters move.

The best open world games - for example, Batman: Arkham Knight - ensure the scope of their worlds doesn't exceed their characters' movement abilities. Arkham Knight, in fact, succeeds at turning the simple act of moving about the world into a genuine pleasure.

God of War, however, builds a big, gorgeous world, and then mostly expects the player to get around it at walking and rowing speeds. There are "mystic gateways" scattered throughout the game map that allow for fast travel, but their functionality is severely limited for the first 2/3 (or so) of the game. They're essentially one-way trains to a central hub -  for most of the game you can fast travel from Point A to the hub, but not from Point A to Point B, or even from the hub to Point B.

As a result, the player is left to spend a lot of time simply rowing around the giant lake the forms the heart of the open world. Again, this isn't actively unpleasant - there's some humor and character building in the conversations between Kratos and Atreus that take place on the boat, for example. But you're always aware of the time you're forced to invest in rowing across the lake, especially since those journeys are never interrupted or broken up by, say, surprise encounters with lurking enemies.

The open world is paired with an increasing emphasis on RPG elements like character and gear upgrades. These existed to some extent in the first three games - Kratos could upgrade his weapons and find power-ups that enhanced his health and magic capabilities, for example. But these upgrades were mainly found within the character's linear path - the new God of War fills out its much larger world with a much larger range of gear to find and tweak.

There's a lot of this stuff, but most of it fails to add anything truly substantive to the experience. At their worst, big, open-world RPGs degenerate into a quest for numbers - the player is less concerned with advancing a story or exploring the world than with finding a sword or piece of armor that has a slightly higher number in the "DAM" or "DEF" columns.

Again, God of War doesn't quite fall into that trap, but it comes closer than you'd like. There's the usual rush that comes from your first big armor upgrade, and a couple enhancements genuinely help - you'll definitely want the Niflheim Mist Armor when trudging through Ivaldi's Workshop in Niflheim. But most of the time you'll find yourself shuffling through various combinations of chest armor, waist armor, gauntlets and enhancements in an attempt to make the numbers on the right side of the screen just a little higher.

In theory, these combinations favor different skills and can be tailored to your unique play style, but the reality is that your "unique play style" is probably the same as mine. Whether you slightly tweak your vitality, your attack power, your defense or your runic abilities, you're likely to approach combat challenges in more or less the same way.

Part of the reason so much of the seek-and-upgrade RPG elements here don't really matter is that God of War's combat never really encourages variety or creativity. God of War is clearly going for a more grounded combat system than the original three games, where combat was a gleeful, acrobatic affair full of spinning blades and flying bodies. The new God of War is more indebted to Dark Souls and other games where combat is a careful, strategic affair.

Except God of War doesn't quite have the courage to go full (or even half-) Dark Souls, and instead settles for a functional, mostly pleasing combat system that never really evolves after the opening battles. You can rack up as many experience points as you like, upgrade Kratos' skill set to include increasingly complicated combos and, in the final battles, you're still likely to get through combat by mashing the light attack button and tossing in the occasional heavy or runic attack.

So instead of the over-the-top fun of the original series or the intellectual pleasures of a more tactical game, God of War mostly ends up creating a simplistic, unchallenging combat system that never finds a niche.

There's no real ability to customize your approach or tactics - you can't build a stealthy Kratos or a long-range specialist Kratos or a tank Kratos. No matter how you invest your experience points or which armor set or enhancements you choose, your game is going to look the same as everybody else's. That's not, in and itself, a crippling flaw - not everything has to be infinitely customizable. But it's aggravating when the game goes out of its way to make you jump through all the RPG min/max hoops, then makes it clear that none of it really affects your experience in a meaningful way.

The same sense of not quite here and not quite there drains some of the force from the game's narrative and atmosphere. God of War clearly has a more complicated relationship with violence than the original games - it doesn't want to wallow in blood and guts, and it wants to interrogate Kratos' rage and aggression.

But God of War wants to have its violence and critique it too. Kratos is more of a reluctant killer than he was in the original series, but he's still slicing through armies of anonymous monsters and demons. And while God of War doesn't revel in over-the-top bloodshed in the manner of its forebears, it's still more than happy to capture decapitations and dismemberments in all their gory, meticulously detailed glory. .

The core of the game is the relationship between Kratos and Atreus. And to be clear, it's exceptionally effective. The dynamic is heartfelt, the product of great care and effort. Director Cory Barlog and the other writers here clearly poured everything they had into sketching out the father-son relationship in God of War, and both the diligence and execution are easy to appreciate.

And yet...for as skillfully crafted as this relationship is, it lacks a certain specificity. In this sense, God of War is hurt by the recent proliferation of videogame stories about fatherhood. Kratos could very easily be Joel from The Last of Us through most of the game - he's distant and struggles to express his feelings, spurns Atreus' attempts to connect, realizes the error of his ways and eventually grows closer to his son. Atreus, for his part, feels both generic and surprisingly modern - he's your standard-issue gregarious little kid, always asking questions and annoying his withholding father, all while quipping in a discordantly 21st century dialect.

Look, stories don't have to be unique to work. The classic storytelling tropes exist for a reason, and even imaginative writers borrow liberally from those who came before. So it's no great failing for God of War to till the village commons.

But still, it's slightly disappointing to see a character with such a striking legacy reduced to the role of Grouchy Dad. There's only a limited sense of how Kratos' specific history shapes his relationship with his son, and the game is oddly silent about Kratos (kinda sorta accidentally) killing his first wife and daughter in the backstory to the very first God of War, which is the sort of event that would seem relevant to current family dynamics.

In the end, God of War is easier to appreciate than it is to love. It has the feel of a genuine passion project for all involved, and yet the attempts to integrate so many of the most popular trends in videogame design that have emerged in the decade or so since God of War III hit consoles robs God of War of some of the uniqueness its pedigree suggests. It's a mish-mash of game elements - all crafted with skill, but without an apparent sense of how they fit together and form a whole.

God of War, then, is both ambitious and a safe play, a game that tries to say and do so much while staying firmly within established boundaries. That it manages to mostly pull off that off is impressive. But it's impossible to shake the impression that God of War could have achieved more if it had committed to something instead of trying to incorporate everything.