God Of War review: a fantastic action-adventure epic with beauty, bleakness and heart
In the eight year gap between 2010’s more conventional sexy gore fest God Of War 3 and this new and improved action-dadventure God Of War, the angry Ancient Greek warboy Kratos handed in his god-killing badge and gun to live in Norse mythology’s woods with his wife Faye and their son Atreus. When Faye dies, Kratos & Son go on a journey to scatter her ashes from the top of a mountain. This becomes a micro rumination on familial relationships, a macro world-saving epic of legendary proportions, and a hack and slash fest that’ll have you grinning from ear to ear. On balance, then, I am Team Fridge Faye.
I played this God Of War on its previously exclusive release on PlayStation in 2018, and it lived in my memory as a 70 hour poetic battle between gods and monsters. Revisiting it again on PC, it turns out that it’s actually only about 20 hours long, but it looms so large as an experience that turning it off at the end feels like stumbling into daylight, having spent many weeks in a firelit, sweaty hunting lodge in a Norwegian pine forest, slamming mead and singing songs about warriors tearing goats in two. There are a lot of big warriors in God Of War. There are a lot of very big things in it in general: statues, dragons, big angry rocks. And a big man, because the titular Kratos, as a yardstick to measure size, is already incongruously big, just so many sacks of salted beef held together by leather armour.
