God of War III Remastered (PlayStation 4) review "Sadly, Kratos would move on to the Norse pantheon, instead of Lovecraft's Elder Gods. But I can dream!"

While I’ve never been the biggest fan of the God of War series — taking the opinion they are perfectly fine action games that have garnered more praise than deserved due to possessing great graphics — I do have to admit that when televisions moved from SD to HD, it was definitely to this series’ benefit.

After all, when so many of the items you can interact with are designated by having tiny bright lights on them, the more vivid the graphics are, the better. Nothing detracts from a fun evening quite like having to bumble through a room repeatedly in an attempt to find that switch you need to flip to access the next challenge because, for whatever reason, your eyes just aren’t focusing on the right thing. With the PS4’s God of War III Remastered that problem was non-existent, which is something I couldn’t say about the PlayStation 2’s games in this series.

That led to my time with this game being a fast-paced experience that mostly was smooth sailing. Sure, there were a few moments when my progress stalled, but at least it was for reasons other than my inability to notice something that probably should have been obvious to me. I suppose that’s the downside of the visual improvements provided by HD…when I go back and play games released beforehand, my powers of observation often seem to decline. A lot.

If you’ve played any of the previous God of War titles, you’ll know what you’re getting into with this one. You’ll control Kratos, a god-like dude with serious anger issues directed at the rest of the Greek pantheon, and you’ll travel through a variety of locations, killing virtually every damn thing you encounter in many, many gruesome ways. Occasionally, you’ll have to take a break from mass slaughter to solve a puzzle in order to continue your journey towards a final confrontation with top dog deity Zeus.

It’s a pretty fun jaunt that looks really good. If there’s one thing I’ve consistently loved in this series, it’s the architecture and III is no exception. You’ll have towering statues, a massive labyrinth made up of giant blocks that can be manipulated, a maze-like garden and other things that give everything a mystical, otherworldly vibe that feels perfectly suited for an attack on the gods in their house.

Another positive was simply that, with one exception, Kratos throws away the whole “anti-hero with justifiable rage against the heavens” act and truly embraces his inner asshole with gusto. At the end of the opening tutorial stuff, he’ll fight Poseidon to the death. Upon winning, he’ll discover that the demise of the ocean god leads to wide-spread, catastrophic flooding. Does this cause our hero to stop and ponder on whether the cost of his quest is far, far more than any potential reward? Hell, no! He simply stalks on with his face curled into a scowl and resumes his divine slaughter. By the end of the game, he’ll have caused the sun to vanish, brought pestilence to the masses and caused the death of plant life. Kratos will not falter…he will continue on this path, regardless of whether he destroys the whole damn world in doing so. We’re talking personal wish fulfillment, folks!

Of course, it does make it a bit strange when Kratos suddenly becomes HORRIFIED because a young, artificial girl who reminds him of his dead child is determined to sacrifice herself and practically begs her to reconsider, but I guess you’ve got to give everyone a line they won’t cross…

Kratos gets plenty of weapons to rip through a list of foes that will be familiar to players of previous God of War titles. Not only will those centaurs, harpies and gorgons be falling to his tried-and-true whip-like blades, but he’ll also get the ability to summon various underworld creatures with one weapon or wield another like gigantic boxing gloves and just pummel the crap out of foes up close and personal. And you won’t have any trouble powering up whichever weapon(s) you enjoy wielding because those red orbs are super-common in this game, making it easy to max out multiple weapons with ease. Which is good for when you get three-quarters of the way through and decide you like those “boxing gloves” the most because it’s pretty damn fun to send minotaurs flying through the air.

Overall, I had a really fun time going through exotic locales and beating down all sorts of monsters and deities in order to power up weapons in order to gain more and more powerful attacks to make it easier to continue beating down tougher foes. But there is something about this series where its games have a bad habit of tripping over themselves just often enough to detract from the experience.

The constant issue is an over-reliance on quick-time events. I’ll admit, I’ve never been the biggest fan of their implementation. At least when they’re overused to the degree they are in these God of War games. It’s one thing to keep them confined to special situations, such as a more cinematic battle where you’re essentially watching a movie and occasionally tapping a button to block an attack or land one of your own. Here, that can happen at any single moment. Not only do you get those action movie fights, but you can QTE virtually every foe in order to get better rewards for killing it…or get battered due to flubbing an entry. Hell, you even have to tap a button repeatedly to open many doors. Because nothing immerses one quite like hitting a button a dozen times to do something that one tap accomplishes in most games.

And occasionally, you get a challenge you’ll find more frustrating than fun. The first game had the time where you had to pull a lever and then move a block to a particular location, scale it and jump to a higher ledge in a strict time limit or instant-death spikes would pop up and do their business. I got through it, but nearly blew a blood vessel in my brain out of pure rage. Well, this game has a late-game moment where Kratos goes through a long free-fall and you have to move him back-and-forth, up-and-down through a tunnel while dodging all sorts of obstacles while moving faster and faster and the screen gets more cluttered and one mistake leads to another and another and you can only take so many hits and then die again and again and make it stop please make it stop no more no more no more.

Much like that ugly little episode in the first game, I did make it through with only a minor shattering of sanity, but I wasn’t having fun and was having those “Why am I doing this?” feelings, which I never like having pop up in a game that had been giving me a lot of enjoyment. And I had been enjoying God of War III. And after getting past it, I was able to — after a day or two to detox — resume enjoying it. But for a time, I wasn’t. And because I wasn’t, I was thinking about those minor annoyances such as needing to excessively tap buttons to accomplish basic tasks. At times, I can see these games through the eyes of those who have bestowed godly amounts of praise upon them…but then moments like these happen and I go back to seeing them as beautiful and mostly fun action games that occasionally become too annoying to be truly great.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (April 11, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.