SEE WHAT BECOMES OF MORTALS WHO WOULD DARE TO CHALLENGE THE MODE OF THE GODS?
LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU ALL!
So far GoW2 is very much more of the same, only better. It’s the same angry Kratos, who just does every little thing agressively. Using a key to unlock a door? Kratos has to grab it and wind up and SLAM that key in there, damnit! He’s pissed! Still full of wonderfully brutal moves and easy-to-control combat and stuff.
And once again, this game just goes to show how important animation is. It’s all about animation and the sense of epic scale.
The two annoying things from GoW1 are back, unfortunately. One is the difficulty curve. You’ll be moving along just fine, not really having a hard time or dying a lot, and just come to a particular boss or staged combat that is just brutal. And you die over, and over, and over. I was doing great, dying just a few times here and there but always moving on easily enough, until I got to the Horse Keeper. I know what I’m supposed to do, but his sorry butt cheesed me to death over and over and over…and when the offer came up to drop the difficulty, I said “hell yeah.”
The other annoying thing is how they make two fundamental improvements to Kratos - increasing the health and mana bars - reliant on finding gorgon eyes and phoenix feathers that are almost always in hidden areas. I’m sort of looking for them and it looks from the guides that I’ve missed a LOT. So the game is harder now essentially because I’m not good at finding secrets. LAME.
I never found Hades difficult at all in the first one. Didn’t mind it at all. But I thought the final battle was a bitch even on Normal.
I just found this part crazy hard until I figured out how to do it quite easily. This was after I had spent about two hours solid on it. The feeling once I passed them was amazing, I’d never channelled my video-game frustration into skill before, and I’d never felt like more of a fucking badass in a videogame. I wish the game had a yell’n’pose button so I could of hit it after I beat those fuckin’ dogs.
Well I picked it up today, so far about 3 hours in on hard mode. So far the game is pretty similar to the first one, but the enviroments are alot bigger. One complaint I’m having with combat is that if an enemy starts their attack animation you can’t knock them out of it, but they can do it very easily to you. Also archers seem to have their accuracy improved over the last one. The story seems good so far, and I haven’t ran into any enemies yet that are frustrating except for a few boss fights.
edit: Just finshed fighting the horse keeper and the boss after that, overall I’m finding that the dodge with the right stick is better then blocking the attack.
Block does seem much more effective in GoW1, though like that game, that may change when the blades are max powered and you can pretty much deflect everything. But for now, just standard swipes are all its good for.
Also it’s interesting to see them directly address some of the easy tactics from the first game too. Groups of armored zombies were easilly dispatched by air-launches and spamming grab over and over, bouncing them mid-air until dead(really helpful for crowd control in God mode). Won’t work here. This also makes fights involving medusa’s much more difficult since the same tactic was even easier for getting rid of them. All those animations are different, so straight fights are much more integral.
The game just doesn’t let up, jumping from one massive setpiece and visual spectacle to the next.
It’s obvious this is a PS2 game, but holy shit do they milk every ounce of power out of that machine! I’m only just past the guy you fight for the first key on the giant horses and I’m blown away by how good this game is.
And for you guys’ concerns about the spinning blades and such from the first one, an interview with one of the devs for the sequel seemed pretty damn aware of all the things people hated in the first game and promised those things wouldn’t be returning. So far so good for me. I’m loving it.
Do they still have the Hades counterattack thing? Where if you block an attack you can immediately got into a full powered end of combo attack? I used that all the time in the first one.
MADNESS? THIS IS SPARTA!!!
Couldn’t help it.
Speaking of replaying the first: does GoW2 have a segment that involves wandering around a blinding sandstorm in random search-spirals listening for sirens? Because I’d completely forgotten how fun that was, how it did not at all break up the velocity of the game, and certainly didn’t give me a headache.
That’s all I could think of too, regardless if it was intentional or not, heh.
On god mode I’ve ran into some tough fighting, one of the problems is that they like to keep the camera a bit too zoomed out which means you can’t see when the enemy is striking. You do get a power that lets you counterattack which is becoming a lifesaver. Two sections so far I had to spam magic power in order to survive. The boss fighting is pretty fun and the way Kratos finshes some of them off is pretty funny and gruesome.
Is it me or are the sub weapons useless when it comes to surviving? I have athena’s blades at level 5 and they are so much more useful then the sub weapons. I agree about how having to find secrets to improve health/magic is pretty crappy, especially when some enemies can hit you for half your health due to combos. I find it annoying that some of chests are basically hidden in the one angle the camera doesn’t show you when you enter a room, and you have to run around the room making sure you don’t miss anything.
Yea, I glanced at a faq briefly during work to see what chests I had missed. At least 3 gorgon eyes and a couple feathers are long gone. :/ I am playing very thoroughly too, but apparently not enough. :sigh:
Also, the horse-rider boss is kicking my ass on Hard difficulty. A longer health and magic bar would be helpful at this point. The hidden life and magic container stuff is really stupid, especially given that you can’t easilly re-traverse previous areas to find them like in Zelda. Going the R&C route or maybe an MGS system(where your bars increase automatically with every boss killed) would have been better. Those hidden potluck chests could just be red orb stashes.
I’m now seeing some pretty dumb combat sections. And the off balanced difficulty at work. I’m at a point where I need to fight multiple enemies in a small area and for some reason the camera is zoomed so far out I can’t accurately time my blocks. The designers love to put you in a small area and have you fight enemies with far attack range. Honestily at this rate I don’t think it’s possible to beat titan mode with just the amount of damage you’ll have to take to be able to get a shot in. Also I think every enemy in Gow1 has made an appearance (including the anubi).
edit: So far the bosses are less frustrating then the regular fighting, besides those fighting segments like the one I’m currentily stuck at, also once again the lightning spell is essential for surviving some of the later fights. Increasing your health and energy after bosses would be pretty good, or just being able to increase it with the red orbs you pick up.
Sounds really grim. I don’t think I’ll be enjoying this too much on my 8 inch lcd flip screen. What was I thinking?
Well last night I finshed the game , I think with the constant dieing at that one section it took me close to 10 hours to beat. Without spoiling it, the last boss is no where near as cheap as in Gow 1. Just started the challenge of the titans, and they made it alot harder then in Gow 1. I’m stuck on challenge 4. I also started titan mode, strange enough I had more trouble with the section after the colossus then I did with the colossus. I watched some of the bonus dvd, for some reason I felt more disapointed with the extras this time around. The lost level section is really almost a false advertisement. Most of the levels featured were just test levels and had no intention of making it into the game, unlike the ones featured in Gow1.
There is one small spoiler that if I knew at the time would have made life so much easier and may make titan mode beatable.
spoiler: When you pick up icarus’s wings they also act as a weapon not just as a glider. Hold L1 and jump and Kratos will do an even higher jump that will also knock most enemies up into the air perfect for setting up air combos. Also when your in the air hold L1 and press X as he comes down to release a gust of wind from the wings that knocks away most lighter enemies.
L1+X was 74% of my combat strategy in GoW1 God mode. ;)
Just reached the horse keeper on titan mode and it’s alot harder now. The arrows he shoots do next to nothing but his melee attack takes off about 1/8 of your health bar per hit. Also it seems that the stuff that comes out of the ground is instant death now . I did notice something that helped me cheese thru the area after rhodes. Throwing enemies into each other does alot of damage, I was able to take down a minotaur in one throw using one of the regular guys. I’m also noticing something weird that’s either a bug or a hidden feature if my health is really low and I keep dieing in the same spot enough times, when I reload from checkpoint I sometimes have more health then I did at the checkpoint before.
I’m very close to the end, and it is better than the first for sure. The fight against She Who Must Not Be Named was very well done, fast paced, and required skill without being unduly frustrating. Then again, it was on Normal mode.
As for Sub Weapons, the Spear is nice when it is upgraded. Being able to switch between that and the Blades on the fly is great.
(and Icarus was great)