E3 09: Hands On With God Of War III

Upon entering our Sony booth tour, I could hardly contain myself. There were so many good things to see but I made a beeline for God of War III to see for myself what a few years and HD could do for Kratos. In bringing Kratos into the now-gen era Sony definitely stuck to the old adage: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

When furthering a franchise like God of War you don't want to mess with the parts that people love. The gameplay style and controls are all exactly as you remember them and this is definitely not a bad thing. The few changes they have made to the core mechanics are welcome ones. For instance, when contextual button actions happen, instead of the button symbols appearing at the bottom of the screen, they appear on the side of the screen that corresponds to where the button is on the controller. This makes it much easier to remember where to press on the controller when your trying to concentrate on the stunning visuals. It can be a bit tricky if you are sitting close to a large screen TV so hopefully in the final version they will being them in just in inch or so from the side to make them easier to catch in your peripheral vision.

Now we get to the changes made in the game. Kratos will have a new arsenal of weapons at his disposal. The two they were showing of in the demo were the Fire Bow (rather self explanatory) and the Cestus, a sort of large pair of spiky boxing gloves. There will be a few other new weapons as well, but Sony was not ready to reveal them at this particular time.

Along with new weapons come new enemies. Harpies were shown and you could grab on to them with your Blades and use them to cross gaps, swinging from Harpy to Harpy and destroying them as you go. A Centaur looked cool had one of the more gory death scenes in the demo. A Chimera Min-boss was nicely designed with it's Lion's head, ram's head and poison spewing snake tail. The Cyclops were back for another round, but this time you can actually jump on top of them and ride them around, using their brute strength to wipe out hordes of enemies.

The real difference between God of War III and it's predecessors is of course the HD graphics. Eye popping is the word that I would use to describe them and it is an apt description in more ways than one, especially when it comes to the Cyclops' death scene. The visuals were amazing and the developers have really outdone themselves with the level of detail and the real time blood splatters all over Kratos after particularly bloody encounters. And speaking of blood, they have definitely toped themselves in the gore department. One particular scene had Kratod pulling off a guy's head in close up that was as shocking as it was brutally exciting, eliciting shouts of "NO WAY" from me and the journalist siting next to me.

God of War III is going to be a spectacular success, delivering familiar gameplay and control with new enemies, weapons and incredible graphics. If it looked this good now, I can hardly wait to see what it will look like when the game launches in March 2010.