God of War is not the Perfect Game

Let me start off by saying that God of War is an excellent game. It is one of the best examples of how to incorporate a story into a game. It has a strong protagonist, that even though not very likable, is different, and far from the clichés that the heroes of action games typically are. And the game has terrific production values, it is tight, beautiful and action packed. But it is not the Perfect Game. If you find that obvious, let me tell you that I've met enough people who hold it in such high regards to make me really worried, and if you do think it's perfect, let me tell you why it's not.

Constantly breaking the suspension of disbelief
One of the most notable features of God of War is the special moves that you get the opportunity to make when you have weakened an opponent. For ordinary enemies, these are optional brutal finishing attacks, and for bosses, these are sequences required to move on to the next part of the fight. To make sure that you know what move to make, the game present you with an image of the correct button to press in the center of the screen. I don't believe I've ever encountered anything that so needlessly and efficiently breaks my immersion. There is absolutely no way that you can forget that you are playing a game when your required button presses are presented in this way. And somehow, this seems to have become industry standard!? Yet there are much better ways of doing this, of achieving the same effect without blatantly destroying any shred of immersion. Prince of Persia: Two Thrones have a similar system in its quick kill system. Unlike God of War, Two Thrones uses the game world to signal when you can activate your quick kill ability. The prince is carrying the dagger of time, and when the dagger starts glowing, a quick kill can be executed. Granted, there is a difference, in Two Thrones, the challenge is timing when to press the only quick kill button, while in God of War, you could be asked to press any button, but that could easily be incorporated by making the dagger glow in different colors, or maybe making the sword, or a fist glow for different required buttons. The point is that there are much, much better ways of doing it. Part of the entertainment I derive from playing a good single player game is living the fantasy of the story, the world, and the characters of the game. Throwing buttons from the controller in my face rudely and forcefully yanks me out of this fantasy, and that detracts from my entertainment.

Adjusting difficulty
Next is an issue I have with the difficulty of the jumping puzzles. God of War consists of two main elements, it is one part a fighting game, and one part a platform game. If you die a lot, the game helpfully offers to lower the toughness of the enemies, and this is a feature I like, however, it also informs you that it will not do anything about the platform bit of the game. And it is always the platform bit that I find difficult. And the difficult part always have the same elements in them. Basically, you are sometimes asked to traverse areas filled with lethal obstacles that require significant timing to avoid. It is also common that you are under time pressure to do so. I would be very surprised if the designers of the God of War team is not aware that these are significant challenges, and it would be easy enough to make the timing requirements laxer on lower difficult levels. It is the biggest source of failures for me while playing the game, and yet there is nothing I can do in order to progress the game other than try to overcome them at the highest (and only) difficulty there is. Excessive failure is not entertaining, and it is a shame that I can't adjust the difficulty of this...

Beam balancing
Beam balancing is a game element I have a very hard time to understand. The challenge is to walk your character along a narrow beam and not fall off. This is done by steering your character in the direction of the beam, and if you fail to do this, your character will start leaning more and more until it finally falls off. At this point, the character grabs the beam, and you have to press a button in order for the character to heave himself back up again.

My problem with beam balancing is that the balancing act isn't terribly exciting, particularly when the cost of failure is so low (just heave yourself back up again). There's no timing involved, there are no decisions to be made, and the only real difficulty comes from the fact that the beam and the camera is not properly aligned so you have a hard time judging which is the proper direction. To me beam balancing is a time consuming nuisance, it takes time from the interesting, entertaining parts of the game, and adds nothing. God of War is far from the only game incorporating this, for instance, the Prince of Persia games have had it, and it was just as bad in them.