PSP Preview- God of War: Chains of Olympus Demo
by Derek Matias on October 28, 2007
When I got home from work today I found a small package waiting for me on my doorstep courtesy of Playstation Underground. In it was a PSP demo for God of War: Chains of Olympus. They also thoughtfully included a chain with the God of War Omega symbol.
So I popped the demo into my PSP and started it up. On the main screen you have three options: Start Demo, Options, and Treasures. Under options you can adjust music and sound volume and view the controller layout– nothing out of the ordinary.
Under treasures, there are 5 spots. The first one says Attica Walkthrough, which is an overview of the first level (playable in the demo) and explained by one of the game directors. The other four spots just say Locked.
When you start the demo you are instantly thrown into battle and the game gives you simple control instructions (square for light attack, triangle for heavy attack, and circle for a grab attack). If you’ve ever played God of War on the PS2 then you will find that the PSP version plays the same way. You will also notice that there is as much detail in the PSP version as there was in the PS2 version.
These were both things that were talked about a little while back when the game developers talked with Playstation Underground members. They pointed out that their goal with the PSP version was to try not to leave anything out from the PS2 version and to work around any problems that may come from being on a portable platform.
As I mentioned before there is a lot of detail in the scenery and in the characters. The sound effects are just as good as the graphics. There is music playing but you can still hear the clanking of Kratos’ weapons with the enemies as well as the sounds of the firing cannons in the background.
In terms of difficulty I was slightly disappointed. There are two ways to play this game– the first is to button mash and this works very well. The second is to approach an enemy and press circle. The second method instantly kills the enemy and you receive absolutely no damage, however, this does not work on the bosses.
This is perfectly acceptable if you are like me and are not very good at trying to remember button combos. The demo was not very long, not even an entire level, but it was free and it was fun.
I was blown away by how good the graphics were. In fact, I could almost mistake it for a ps2 game. But what killed it for me was that it is a port of a PS2 game– the same game with a new storyline. I have no idea what the other difficulty modes are like, and whether it has any other game modes that would give me a reason to play it again. God of War: Chains of Olympus is definitely going to be a great game to add to your collection, but don’t decide until the rest of the game’s features are released.
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on November 10, 2007 1:37 am
You complain it’s a port… but why make a new engine when the one they have is technologically sound for the PSP. It would require too much work, and little payoff. Maybe slightly better graphics MAYBE and they would have to tweak it to make it play exactly like the PS2 ones. No reason why it shouldn’t be a ported engine.
on December 26, 2007 11:53 pm
I complained about it being a port because it has no originality.