Athena, quite reasonably concerned at her protégé’s bloodthirsty leanings, gets our boy demoted to demigod status right in the middle of the fray, leaving Kratos not just to fight his way through masses of justifiably annoyed Rhodes guardians, but at the mercy of the towering colossus an enormous metal giant whose hands tear through buildings and whose face can fill the whole screen. Where do you start with a game like this? How about where God of War 2 opens, with our musclebound anti-hero, Kratos, now elevated to godhood, leading an army of Spartans in a raid on the city of Rhodes. It makes a lot of so-called next-generation games seem small. If the first game was Jaffe’s Fellowship of the Ring – a signal that a previously middleweight talent has suddenly shifted into creative overdrive – this is his Return of the King: a fully-realised feast of imagination combined with sheer technical muscle. God of War 2 makes it look like Jaffe was only half-trying. God of War was, without doubt, one of the most phenomenal video games of the last five years. As one man fought his way through hordes of foes and battled monstrous beasts, then scaled vast buildings sat atop a Titan’s back, you could practically hear jaws dropping around the world. At a time when Microsoft’s Xbox was making the PS2 look old and tired, and with the next-generation of hardware waiting in the wings, God of War proved that the little black console still had the power to amaze. His 2005 Greek myth epic seemed purposefully designed to confound your expectations, not just of what you could do and show in an action game, but of what you could do and show with the ageing PS2 hardware. To say that God of War’s creator, David Jaffe, thinks big might be the understatement of the year.
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