WHAT’S NEW PLUS-SY CAT?
Digging into the random acts of gaming a lengthy PS Plus subscription offers
With a titanic God Of War Ragnarök feature starting on p46, I’d be missing trick if I didn’t take a peek at the series’ past. Before 2018’s God Of War, there was God Of
War III. Debuting on PS3 in 2010, the 2015 PS4 remaster was offered to PS Plus subscribers in September 2018.
It’s worth reflecting on just how different a direction the 2018 soft reboot took the series in. Few things demonstrate this quite as starkly as God Of War III’s opening. The first 15 minutes involve a Titan assault on Mount Olympus, fighting on the ceiling, and even a weird, watery spider-horse… thing? As a recovering drama nerd and a series newcomer who has only properly sat down with the 2018 reboot before this, I’d be lying if I claimed there wasn’t at least an element of this balls-out bombast that did not appeal. The blade-flinging melee combat is also exceptionally moreish.
Naturally there are some very 2010 aspects of this release that are far less appealing – I mean aside from the implied QTE sex scene with Aphrodite, but don’t get me started! As we highlighted in our
remaster review at the time, III’s version of Kratos boasts a single-minded rage that is more than a little wearying, to say the least, all this time later. While 2018’s systems and mechanics don’t always come together, I definitely prefer its far more thoughtful characterisation.
Wheeling back around to titles that are all about the action, let’s look at last month’s PS Plus selection. Leading the charge on PS5 was Hell Let Loose,a
WW2-inspired multiplayer game that pits two 50-person teams against each other. On PS4, fighter
Mortal Kombat X offered something just as destructive but a touch more intimate with its one-on-one bouts. Closing out the PS4 offerings was golf game PGA Tour 2K21.
Somewhere among those titles, subscribers were sure to have a ball.