This game is, by far, the highest BPM (buttons per minute) of any game I’ve played in the last year. Because Kratos needs to wield his weapons in the fast-paced, frenetic finale to the God of War Trilogy. Vengeance requires a lot of buttons!
There is no tutorial, no respite and no quarter given. You begin the game on the back of the titan Gaia who is climbing Mt. Olympus to help you kill Zeus. Perhaps one of the coolest intros to a game ever.
Just how big is this game? Well, at times Kratos is but a tiny little man in the vastness of the screen. You can still control him during what looks like cut scenes and at times you need to as it will help you succeed. The game then zooms back into the action and you can get back to the path of vengeance.
They do a fantastic job of balancing the button mashing with some exploration, collection and puzzle placement to break up the monotony. Also, an action will sometimes trigger an attack, even when you know it’s coming it’s still cool. Instead of just mindlessly sending wave after wave of enemy at you, there is some minor logic to it all. However, the button-mashing does get to frenzied levels more so than any other game in recent memory. It’s all about chaining together attacks to get a higher combo number. My highest is 250 and I think there’s a trophy for hitting 1,000 which would be some serious button mashing and a good amount of enemies nearby.
The game is steeped in ancient mythology and when you’ve got big names like Zeus, Atlas and Gaia, you need big voices to go with. The likes of Clancy Brown, Rip Torn, Michael Clarke Duncan, 
Linda Hunt, Adrienne Barbeau and others have lent their voices to the game to give it that extra bit of pop. And pop it does. The sound is fantastic from the voices, to the environments, to the soundtrack. Sure, sometimes you’ll get tired of hearing the swing and slash of your weapons but at least they didn’t put in lame recurring statements by your character. Of course, Kratos is one of those ’only speak when I have something to say’ types and that suits me just fine.
The visuals are of course as amazing as expected. I love the fact that Santa Monica Studio put in podiums that basically say ’look how cool that art over there is’ and give you a panoramic view of some portion of the world. It’s almost like a stop and smell the roses, or in this case appreciate the work, that was put into the game. I haven’t checked to see if there’s a trophy for stopping and admiring it all, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Now it’s not all wine and roses in the realm of the gods. There are some flaws in the game. For example, the double jump which allows you to glide on the wings of Hades. I did several tests with the speed at which you must push the jump button and I truly believe that a microsecond makes a difference between success and failure. Then there is the fact that some areas of the game open just for you to fall into and die, while many, many others are blocked off by the game 
so that you do not fall in and die.
Oh, and die you will. I have been playing for about 9 hours and have 75 deaths. That’s a death roughly every seven minutes. But really, it’s 4 deaths in a row doing some stupid double jump maneuver gone awry or three deaths in a row because I didn’t climb something or swing off of something fast enough. The fact that the stats track how many times you die makes me realize that they knew you would die enough for that to be an interesting statistic. Sort of lame if you ask me, after all, aren’t you a god? Plus, when in the Underworld aren’t you technically already dead? How can you then die again?
There are a wide range of things that make this game cool. Aside from the graphics and sound, you get to rampage through Olympus and kill no less than six gods (Poseidon, Hades, Helios, Hermes, Hera Zeus), and even rip the head off of one. You also all but seal the fate of at least two Titans, Hercules and several other notable staples of said ancient myths. Nothing like an ego boost for a Sunday morning right?
But the game is ofttimes irritating in that ’why the F am I having to do this again and again?’ way because some of the more platform-like levels are frustratingly annoying. Still, overall, the game is well worth the time and money. It’s far from perfect but it’s a great example of what can be achieved, even with
some flaws. I’m certain that I’m near to the end now and have maybe an hour or so of gameplay left so for those of you like me to die a lot and explore every nook and cranny, it could run a good 12 hours or so.
The game is rated M for mature and rightly so with extreme amounts of violence and blood and an ample amount of naked bosoms and a sexually oriented mini-game with Aphrodite.
