God of War: Sons of Sparta

PS5 review

Pro:

Story.

Environments.

God of War is a franchise, known for its amazing visual design of the environmental art within each game.

Sons of Sparta is no exception, despite it being limited to the 2D plane, and instead using a retro 16-Bit art style.

Enemy variety.

The game features over 25 boss battles, and while no Gods are featured as enemies this time around, a lot of older monsters do make a return as bigger threats to new monsters, such as various Chimera or mechanical bulls.

Up until now, Cyclops, which used to be mini bosses or minor enemies in other titles, are now big boss characters in boss battles for the young Kratos.

The player is also challenged with new monsters that make use of the range weaponry the player has access to in this game, with enemies and bosses that stay airborne the majority of the time. Players cannot just rely on brute forcing the boss fight by spamming light attack or spirit attacks like other ground-based boss battles.

While Sons of Sparta is less gory compared to other God of War games when it comes to the boss battles, they are still a great challenge and a massive difficulty spike when players encounter Alastor, as he was the first fight I died at.

Puzzles.

Like all the other entries in the franchise, Sons of Sparta sees the return of the puzzle aspect of the series, that are more simplified with the 2D aspect.

Instead of the puzzle challenges, this time around focuses on platforming using the various God abilities to get collectibles, or the most fun platforming puzzles are in the Muse’s Trials under a strict time limit.

Due to the sheer number of collectibles in the game, the player reuses all of their equipment throughout the entire game in every map. This makes the Olympian gifts feel much more impactful than in any prior games, as instead of only being used in combat, they are used to interact with the environment a lot more often.

Music.

Bear McCreary returns from prior God of War games to create the soundtrack for this game with a more retro feel like SNES and PS1 Metroidvania games.

Sons of Sparta features a good mix of atmospheric songs and boss battle music, with the highlight being the Oenus Vineyard level for the best level aesthetic and soundtrack, combined with its dark and foreboding atmosphere.

Con:

Collectibles.

While the standard in a Metroidvania game is to have a lot of collectibles across the map, I found that Sons of Sparta went too overboard with the sheer amount of them.

As nearly every segment of the map has at least one collectible to find, this makes it very tedious to return after every new power up.

I would recommend players only go collectible hunting once they have the Nike power up that lets them smash through gold barriers, because at that point players can access every part of the map.

Arsenal.

Unlike every other God of War game, Kratos only has access to one primary weapon throughout the entire game.

The other weapons’ players pick up are all gifts from the Gods and can only be used for as long as the player has Magic availability, otherwise they cannot be used, even for basic attacks.

This leaves the player with the default Spear weapon, that while customisable, still only uses one light attack chain (as there was no point using the heavy attack in the game) for the player to use.

Players cannot create combo strings like in the other games by mixing light and heavy attacks together, with the only change being the final hit in the chain by changing the parts of the spear.

Deimos.

It is great to see Deimos return to the franchise after Ghost of Sparta over twenty years ago.

He is set up to be the co-lead of the story and accompanies Kratos on his journey. However even though the game is advertised as 2 player, the other player cannot take control of Deimos in story mode, only in a post-game unlockable side mode called “Pit of Agonies”.

He feels wasted in the story since he always disappears outside of cutscenes and some boss fights, so there is no way to use Deimos in any sort of platforming or combat.

The worst part of Deimos is how often he glitches out in boss fights and just remains static, refusing to fight the entire time, so out of 25 boss fights in the game Deimos only fought back in 5 of them.

Glitches.

Sons of Sparta was unfortunately riddled with several glitches that I encountered over my play through.

There were not just visual glitches of hovering error messages like “CAPTION HERE” that was displayed over invisible treasure chests and the graveyards, but issues such as dialogue and subtitles too. 

The most common glitch I had was with the dialogue in the game. During my play through, I had both Deimos and Kratos constantly talking over each other and interrupting themselves.

In addition to the dialogue issue, there was another glitch that went alongside it with the subtitles. Even though the dialogue window stretched across the entire screen in a black box, the majority of the time each sentence would be cut-off and then carry on the next line.

This makes it so the subtitles would constantly be way behind the audio, especially with the overlapping audio dialogue tracks from the characters.

Fast Travel.

The player at the start of the game can only fast travel to each Temple ground or remote island, and very late in the game the player gets the ability to fast travel to each bonfire.

However, due to the size of the map, the Temple fast travel is useless if the player wants to quickly go back to one area of the map for a collectible they missed.

The ability to fast travel to bonfires comes way too late in the game to be that useful as the player will have collected most of the collectibles by then if they are paying attention.

The player should have had the ability to fast travel to lit bonfires and Temples since the start of the game to cut down on the copious amounts of backtracking.

Saving.

In this game, they decided to go back to fixed save points across the map. 

In this case, it’s the various bonfires where the player can talk to NPCs and level up, and unfortunately this is the only way to save progress in the game.

Players cannot save in the main menu or reload prior save files, instead they just have the one save file that updates at the bonfire.

During my play through, I had two crashes where I lost a lot of progress, with one crash losing me nearly an hour’s worth of progress that I then had to redo.

Conclusion: 

A fun Metroidvania game that helps fill in some of the blanks in the God of War lore with this younger Kratos and Deimos.

For players of this game, I would recommend to specifically focus on the main story and side stories instead of trying to get all the collectibles since that really drags the game out.

Score: 6.0