Dreams of Being Eaten Alive

God of War 3
When playing a game as corrosively idiotic as God of War 3, one would at least hope for a modicum of awesomeness. Sadly, the third and - supposedly - final chapter in the God of War series offers very little in the way of such pleasures.

The game starts off promisingly enough with Kratos scaling Mount Olympus on the back of a Titan ready to wage outright war on the gods of Olympus. So far so good. Surely, a nonstop cavalcade of thrilling set-pieces awaits. Instead, Kratos is thrown down to Hades (again) only to lose all of his powers (again) and is forced through a tedious gauntlet of mindless skirmishes (again) and moronic puzzles (again) to acquire skills he will never use (again). The only notable sequence is when the game bizarrely decides to become a cross-promotional tie in for The Cube 13 years too late.

This Sisyphaen struggle through lazy game design seems to have taken its toil on our bro-tagonist. Kratos spends half the game foaming at the mouth yelling "Zeeeuuuuuuussss!" with the unbridled rage of a hormonal 13 year-old who was just told he wasn't going to make the JV squad. All of the grotesqueries of the deicidal cutscenes would be forgivable if the game ended as a bleak meditation on the nihilistic algebra of revenge. Instead it pulls its punches and metamorphoses into an unearned morality play on the audacity of hope -- or something. I honestly couldn't be bothered to care during the interminable endgame.

It seems to me that the real lesson of the series is that the universe and gamers would have been better off if Kratos had successfully killed himself after the first game.

Grade: C-