March is the month for platform exclusive prequels it seems, and from Sony's Santa Monica studios comes a real belter of a slash-em-up. As the developer's second major foray on PlayStation 3, God of War: Ascension renders out the early days of perpetual angry-man, Kratos, and gives us a chance to see where the team's penchant for striking, mythic backdrops has taken it this time. It may be back to square one for the leading demi-god, but a calm before the storm this most certainly is not.
Though perhaps less muscular in his younger years, the lengthy demo shown during Sony's E3 2012 conference revealed just how early on our Spartan hero started up with the whole limb-lopping act. Now that we've had some time with the 715MB demo ourselves, we're more clued in on how the game's tech has been tweaked from its use in God of War 3 too - itself a strong indicator of where things may stand for the final release.
Onto the basic setup then: rather than overhaul the engine built for the last game - costing circa $44m for Sony to produce in the first place - subtler tweaks are in order for Ascension. Clearly an ongoing evolution of ideas, series director Stig Asmussen seemed convinced towards the end of the last game's production that "there's a lot more we can do with it" [Updated: typo corrected!]. He highlighted improved animation blending systems in particular as one of the big steps forward for any future release that may come to be, declaring "we just didn't implement it in God of War 3 because it came in real late."
Fast forward two years, and what have we got? The fundamentals of resolution and anti-aliasing appear to be as we'd left them, with a 1280x720 framebuffer married with an effective post processing pass to clear artifacting on edges. A subtle sub-pixel shimmering is present across stretches of high density texture-work, such as the craggy skin of the demo's elephantine Juggernaut boss. This is telling for its association with morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA), but besides that, Ascension is an impeccable game to watch in motion, and as before, harsh edges very rarely escape the watchful AA censor.
The biggest break from series tradition would be the lowered frequency of quick time events, in favour of interactive mini-games to land the finishing blow on a boss. Plus, we see a wholesale revision of the real-time combat. There are pilfer-able weapons to wield this time, for example, such as javelins, clubs and swords, whose swipes and jabs link smoothly with Kratos' usual fire-lashing chain attacks. The flow of battle feels unmistakeably more fluid than God of War 3's too, and we now have the ability to tether a chain-hook to enemies from across the screen, without the demand to follow-up with an attack immediately after.
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Building on the stunning God of War 3, Sony Santa Monica's new prequel looks set to extract even more performance from the PS3 hardware.
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peaches
A sto punto spero nel Single. Ma c'è sempre MGS Rising da prendere in alternativa
TO VICTORY!
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