Also, I played one of the LOTR games, and remember the combat being much sloppier. Maybe I’ve just gotten stupid.

Now, maybe it gets fantabulously better after the intro level, but based solely on the hackneyed gameplay, the boring combos (straight out of the Lord of the Rings games), the insulting gore, and the endless, deathmarch-like boss fight that ended the level, I’d say the only way this game could be any worse would be if it was named “God of Suck” and your protagonist’s name was Sucky McSucksuck.

My working theory is people are raving about the game because it has some boobs in it.

In fact, however, nobody connected with _God of War_ could write a
moral struggle if one came up and bit them in the Santorum. The story
of the game was “rarrrggh, beat things”; the protagonist was “rarrgh,
beat things”; and the writers thought they were being inestimably
clever by making him violent and two-dimensional. So, “whatever”. He’s
a video game character, and so is everyone he meets.

Allow me to speak up for the jumping puzzles: to someone who enjoys
jumping puzzles, _God of War_ was excellently constructed. Neither too
hard nor too easy.

(I rarely care much one way or the other about combat systems. This
one was okay. I played on “easy” all the way through, which allowed me
to slaughter everything I met with basic pound-the-button tactics.
Speaking as someone who enjoys the jumping puzzles, I was totally fine
with that.)

There’s one bit around the middle of the game where you have to sacrifice a prisoner. It isn’t an option, you end up dragging a guy in a cage and flambeing him, while all the time he’s screaming for mercy and begging to be let go. I really was put off by this.

I know it’s weird – I can happily blow up populations in the thousands in a wargame or the like, but I felt that the fact that they dragged it out, gave you no option but to do so and made it so visceral primarily to open a lock that was basically just dropped in front of you nauseating.