It’s probably even more boring to complain about shoe-horned multiplayer modes in classically single-player games than it is for developers to keep including them, so we won’t. And it was with this attitude that we pulled up our dusty boots, ripped off our shirts and dived – roaring, naturally – into the God Of War: Ascension beta.
Immediately, it doesn’t feel tacked on. Why? Primarily, because it’s not a shooter. This is a world that hasn’t been beaten to death and lorded over by two or three unbeatable masters. The world of online brawling has barely been tackled this generation, and so God Of War: Ascension feels kind of fresh.
The beta itself offers three game modes – a free-for-all four-player ruck called Favour Of The Gods, an eightplayer melee known as Team Favour Of The Gods (a stupid name if there ever was one) and the altogether less flashily monikered Capture The Flag.
Before any of that, though, is a brief but tasty tutorial. You choose your allegiance (class, basically) by stepping up to the statue of one of four gods of Olympus, and the whole scene is played out with that familiar and always amusing God Of War pomp. You can pick from Ares, Hermes, Zeus and
Poseidon, but we kept it as real as can be and plumped for the old war god himself, Ares. This meant our champion – the bald, steroid-swamped rage-man that he is – is best suited to aggressive melee combat.
Good job too, as the tutorial then asks you do to rather a lot of that. Thankfully, if you’ve played God Of War before, you know what to do. Light and heavy attacks, a launcher when you hold triangle, and a nasty chain to pull your idiot opponent back towards you. Circle delivers a boot of justice (great for punting someone into a wall of spikes) and L1 is the always-trusty block button. God Of War’s combat has always been parry-heavy, and the multiplayer maintains that flow, but does so by altering the input. Instead of just timing a block, you now have to hit X at the same time. This then pops a brief bubble or shield around your character, and any hit will bounce off it. If it sounds like the system has been oversimplified, don’t worry. It’s just a case of clever compensation for latency.
Not that we saw any of that. The flow of the action in Favour Of The Gods is frantic and furious, but surprisingly well-measured. Mashing buttons won’t work; you need to time your combos, wait for your opponents to overreach themselves and mess up, and of course deal out the type of Ancient Greek justice that’ll turn the Aegean red.
Smashing down an enemy’s health bar puts them in a stunned state, and you can finish them in typically gory style by plunging your sword through their chest or tearing off their head. The violence in God Of War has always felt thematically appropriate, and the gladiatorial nature of this multiplayer
only cements that. Yes, it’s gratuitous, but that’s the point.
The main attraction is Team Favour Of The Gods, which features two groups of four battling over territories, Domination style – while a giant Cyclops smashes the back of the map. There are plenty of ways to win, be it from simply holding as many capture points as possible to the massive haul of points you receive if you can actually kill the Cyclops with the randomlydropped Spear Of Olympus.
There’s so much going on that there’s plenty of scope for unscripted drama – always the meat of good multiplayer – and it’s clearly a well designed mode, but at the moment it’s very easy for your character to get lost in the carnage. Hopefully Sony Santa Monica will figure out a way of improving the highlighting on your own avatar, or perhaps moving his own health bar to the top of the screen so
you always know when you’re in danger. Easy fixes. Finishing off the Beta is Capture The Flag, which despite its tried and tested roots still manages to bring some God Of War power and flavour to its action. Everyone knows what to do, of course, but the button-mashing minigame to yank the flag from its home is gratifyingly muscular, and again the whole thing’s overseen by a scenerysmashing
Cyclops.
So, does God Of War: Ascension actually ‘need’ this multiplayer aspect? Well perhaps not, but it’s also good to remember that multiplayer doesn’t need to be a 12-month investment of hundreds of hours. This gratuitously gory modernised version of Power Stone is already cracking fun, and even if the final thing only makes for a fun couple of weeks, who cares? Just enjoy it.
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