Lords of Shadow does a lot of things right, but unlike God of War 3, it also does a lot of things wrong. I will make a list.
- Camera can sometimes be really bad, it just wasn't designed very well and it wasn't adapted to the environments they made. The camera should never be off the character, especially in a fight, the camera should also be able to predict where your going and what your planning to do, it's hard, but it's something God of War has nailed since the first game.
- The level design ranges from good to bad, it's a linear game but it has unapproachable openings all over the place, this is confusing and can get annoying when it's so frequent. It's linear, I should never get lost and yet I did, I'd just keep running around trying to find the exit and then it'd end up being some small crevice at the corner of the map.
- Framerate drops badly at some points.
- This is not an opinion, the platforming isn't good, God of War 3 plays better and the transitions between platforms are much smoother and quicker.
- Fighting the titans was a horrible experience, it was extremely boring and it just wasn't fun, it tried to do what God of War and Shadows of the Colossus does best and it failed miserably. Doing it once was annoying, doing it four times was ball bustingly bad.
- While the combat was very good, the items felt pretty much useless. It also doesn't help that your using roughly the same weapon throughout the whole game, but as I said the combat was fun and it was flexible.
- The set pieces are a whole class lower than the ones in God of War 3, the closest one would be the battle towards the end.
- The Titan graveyard was boring as shit.
- The puzzles ranged from cool to stupid, half of them were based around the fail and repeat until you win formula and it's a design choice I can't appreciate.
- It's a very long game and I can appreciate that, but it's a long linear game, which is something I can't appreciate. 20 hour or more games are better suited to sandboxes and RPG's, only because they can provide the variety. Editing exists for a reason, some levels at the beginning of the games were way too long, while some later in the game could have benefited from more content.
Basically, God of War is a top notch franchise for many reasons, but one of the primary reasons is that it's made by masters of their craft. It's a smooth, polished and thrilling experience and that's something Lords of Shadow couldn't provide. Mercury Steam did a fantastic job and they made a lot of interesting decisions and I'd be willing to bet that if they had Santa Monica guiding them when it came to things like optimization, camera work, level design and the finer points of game design, then they would have easily bested God of War 3.
I look forward to a sequel.
Bet with Conegamer and AussieGecko that the PS3 will have more exclusives in 2011 than the Wii or 360... or something.
