now playing — god of war|chains of Olympus

played on PS Vita

Chains of Olympus is a good game, but mostly an exercise in the initial titular promise of the PlayStation Portable — bringing an almost PS2 fidelity game on the go with you — and that’s exactly what it does.

There is nothing here you will not have seen in other God of War games, and a story with a few very laughable QTE moments (pushing your daughter away by mashing O is, and always will be hilarious). You get the broad strokes of other titles in the series though, and bringing that onto a portable in an era where Nintendo DS reigned, was very novel.

I also think that the way the control of magic is handled, is far superior to the PS2 God of War titles — necessity is the mother of invention, as it is said, and Chains of Olympus deftly mapped the casting of spells to one shoulder button and a corresponding face-button. This is far easier to do than going over to the D-Pad, taking your thumb off of the analog sticks, to select a spell and throw it with the dedicated “cast” button. Even it’s direct successor, “Ghost of Sparta”, fucked this up, in moving the magic spells back over to the D-Pad.

This is an unessential God of War story that doesn’t do much to tie it into the larger pantheon of games, aside from establishing more of a relationship between Kratos and Calliope, but again that is largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. The stories of these early games was mostly an excuse to drive you into interesting locations, fight Grecian myths, and solve puzzles. All of that is on display here, and with surprising fidelity for an almost twenty-year old portable game.

One small complaint here is the uneven difficulty — I found some of the games bosses to be far above the difficulty level established in the lead-ups to them. A game should strive to be a steady curve upwards, but Chains of Olympus has some ball-buster bosses…in particular the final one that has an unskippable cutscene right before the fight, which results in you seeing it over and over again. I was pretty meticulous in collecting all my resources and upgrades, and still had trouble with a few rooms and bosses towards the end of the game. I’d rather have too much challenge than not enough, but it didn’t feel quite right to me.

Another small complaint is that the locations are mostly standard fair interior palaces, temples, rooms without a lot going on. The opening is great, set on a massive battle-field with a basilisk stomping around everywhere…but after that the game mostly takes place inside the temple of Morpheus, which is a grey-on-grey typical temple setting.

Outside of these minor complaints, Chains of Olympus is a solid entry in the series, albeit one that doesn’t do a lot to move things forward, but I don’t think that was really the point — If the measure of success for this project was, “Hey let’s try to pack a real God of War game onto a handheld”, then they succeeded with flying colors, with only a few small missteps. I’m hesitant in saying it’s one of the best PSP games, but it is certainly among the most impressive.