It’s always good to get an unexpected gift. You’re minding your own business and, boom, something really cool just drops in your lap. It’s like finding money. Or that one sock you’ve been missing for ages. But while it’s always nice to be handed a surprise present, you can’t guarantee until you open it whether it’s a shoebox stuffed full of tenners or another Lynx shower gel set. I’ll let you make your own mind up about God of War Sons of Sparta, but I know which way I’m leaning on this one, and I ain’t getting any richer.
First of all, a protagonist named Kratos does not necessarily a God of War game make. Framed as a prequel exploring an adolescent Kratos and his younger brother Deimos, Sons of Sparta eschews the frenetic combat of the originals and the more measured brutality of the recent titles for the 2D plane. As Kratos, you’ll trudge through levels with a permanent scowl, hackles up, spear clutched in your hands like a comfort blanket.
Even as a wee lad, though, Kratos is a bit of a menace, as evidenced by the opening scene when he and Deimos take out a full-grown cyclops. It’s a bit odd though, that even before the events of the God of War games, Kratos was chopping up mythical monsters alongside his brother. No one bats an eye, either, which suggests that Kratos is nothing special anyway.
Regardless, the story sees you and Deimos heading out from your village to look for a missing friend, aided by Amara, the daughter of your sculptor friend. Usually girls aren’t allowed to be warriors, but she’s different because she’s feisty. Why there are no adult Spartans around to fight all the monsters, skeletons, minotaurs, and giant fire birds that are roaming around twenty or so paces from the village is not fully explained.
If it sounds like I’m down on God of War Sons of Sparta, it’s because I kind of am. It doesn’t feel or look much like a God of War game at all, and in fact had it not been related to Sony’s killer franchise it wouldn’t have made much difference. Sure you’d lose the connection of gruff adult Kratos telling the story to his daughter Calliope as a framing device, but that’s really all.
The game unfolds like a fairly standard Metroidvania, too. Kratos can find various parts for his spear which can be swapped out and upgraded to give it different buffs and effects, while there are unlockable skills and abilities you can earn by spending blood orbs that drop from enemies and chests. It’s fairly basic stuff, but is pretty effective nonetheless.
What lets Sons of Sparta down for me, though, is the combat. It feels incredibly clunky at times, and your spear attacks lack any noticeable sense of impact. You can jab in any direction, which is cool, but it rarely feels like you’re delivering blows with any weight. You’ll unlock a sling early on that you can use to activate switches or deliver ranged damage. Enemies will often use colour coded attacks, which took me a while to get my head around as there are simply too many of them, and you’ll need to watch out for blue, yellow, red, and purple attacks to determine the correct response, when most can just be dodged.
You have an i-frame dodge roll that only works some of the time, and good luck getting up on a ledge if an enemy is standing there, as they’ll just bat you off. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that both campfires (at which you can save and level up) and temple shrines (at which you can fast travel) weren’t so oddly spaced. Sometimes it feels like ages between them, and other times they’re weirdly close together. The platforming, which often involves navigating environmental puzzles and hazards, is quite fun at times, but the disjointed animation makes movement feel a little unnatural.
It’s not an unattractive game, but the environments are pretty sparse, and the animations are surprisingly bare-boned in an era when pixel-art action games are pushing the boat out in terms of animation and spectacle. There’s just not really much going on here to dazzle, and God of War Sons of Sparta feels a little unexciting as a result.
Despite this, it’s an inoffensive 2D action game with some decent ideas where navigation and progression are concerned – if only you weren’t interrupted so often by yet another conversation with Deimos. Listening to him and Kratos talk, with all their anachronistic modern parlance, just breaks the immersion at every turn. They chat like Californian teenagers chilling on the beach, and when they were given a literal magical walkie-talkie that delivers Deimos’ voice through the DualSense speaker, complete with a tinny twang, I almost uninstalled it there and then.
Perhaps it’s my undying love for pretty much everything else this franchise has ever produced that’s colouring my opinion of God of War Sons of Sparta, but it’s a game that could and should have been more. It lacks the violent joy of the early games and the emotional weight of the latter, and delivers a fairly standard Metroidvania experience that doesn’t do much to stand out among the thronging crowd of its genre.
