Shit. I thought they were only reducing the difficulty on normal? Glad I beat the Trails on hard before it got patched.

TO start it off i actually played the game and finished it.  I agree with TimCliveroller . Don't get me wrong the graphics are really awesome but graphics alone don't make a game jaw dropping as what you see in God of war ascension  has been done before with other iterations of the series.  There are however significant iprovements to the single player core gmaeplay but none of it is game changing to say the least.  If i were to be honest here, th ecombat feels more of a downgrade as you are stuck with teh same weapon but with added elementals attached to it. Its a nice change but not to the levels of other hack and slash games like  the orignal and the only good ninja gaiden. I know alot of you mention the difficulty being higher in the newest god of war, I would say yes and no. The only reason for it being remotely challenging , is because of the limitation in the combat system. One example is the trial or archimedes . which is th e only challenging part of the game. Those who have finished it oor are playing the game would know what i mean.  Icompleted it before they added the patch. To sumamrize is a trial. you have three stages to go through and each stage has two levels of fighting to complete before progressing. The most annoyign one wa sthe first floor. Now this is where the limitation of the combat truly shines.  The first wave is two waves of medusa snakes.  Mind you the area to maneaveer is very small. This is nto to ba dbut its cheap. When you dodge roll one , you can't dodge the roll again staright away. theres a cool down perioid hwich i sga,, so when you dodge one attack the second snake will attack just as you are about to get oout of your first doge roll . plu sthey know when you rage meter is full, to hug you which depeltes all your rage back to zero.  The second wave however is 2 medusa and 4 lighting ladies .  But you fight the first 4 in that small area. This shwer the cheapness starts. the lightning crreatures has AOE unblocakble that stuns you and they have the homing electricity spell. So what they do is one of thsie cratures will stunn you  the unblocakble AOE while teh other two shoots. while you are stunn teh wo medusa will join in and swoop you till you snap out it . then as you abou to snap of it , one of the lightning creatures will cast the unblockable spell again and the cycle continues. you can dodge out it but shwill keep casting it where you are and sometime they both do it at one go. If you pst the first one you mvoe on to the second floor. This is one is very narrow to the point where if you doge onnce oon one side you touch the wall . This oen you have 2 spears and tons and unlimited flyign guys. as you can see her ewhwne they all attack at once in small area ith a zomm in camera and the only thing you can see is kratos ass and the enemies ass then you have a problem. Its very doable to do it but you will die a few times . It won't take 6 hours like adam sessler took lol. Firget to say no matter how far you go in your trials , if you die you start from the beginning adn there are no health orb chest to regain health. Don't take my word fo rit , vg chartz did mention the comabt limitation in their review. From here you can see that the gmae i smore cheap then challenging because tghe own combat system during intesne and combat scenes struglles to cope with it. The way to win is to block dodge rool, parry , use the subdue magic and orkos spell. if you can't do that , then jsut block  then press square sqaure, doge block square square squar lacking any skilful ability to win adn proof that you can spamm one attack and win. I do have to say multiplayer is fun hehe. playing that everyday. hope they do make it more balanced in future patches  

Yeha MP is an absolute blast. THey just need to make sure players can join mid-game so it won't get unbalanced when ppl leave

Poseidon all the way!

what of the five real world weapons, rage mode, rage attacks etc etc etc

i have to say that i disagree on that strongly

also all elemental changes to the blades bring their own unique movesets

for example L1 then square with fire causes kratos to whip his blades in a spiral while with lightning he shoots a ball of lightning

imo outside of the regular square and triangle attacks they might as well be completely different weapons because of how differently they function

with regards to combat limitations what you described imo isn't a limitation imo

that cool down period kratos has off rolls is clearly there to keep the player from abusing it as a tactic for running from enemies

its there to force the player to be confrontational and to use blocking more also

that unblockable move the sirens have has a very long start up ( the sirens bendover backwards for a fairly long time ) so it can be predicted

as i said i haven't gotten to the trials of archimedes yet but it sounds like you just have to time when to dodge, roll and use your items well

not that there are combat limitations ( btw kratos' roll was like that in GoW 3 as well )

I just got it... played for a good 3 hours or so. Got to a part where dogs and harpies came out after a bridge collapsed on me... I got to say I don't fucking understand any of the reviewers complaints (only thing I don't like so far are the menus... Those are ugly as hell but I didnt see thatbeing talked about in reviews)

The graphics are mind bowing. The first prt is EPIC. The battle system is as polshed as ever. And so far the story is as strong as th other 3... Like I saw people saying the story doesn't give you a drive to keep going... thats total bullshit

Swans obviously doesn't play GoW if he thinks kratos is unscarred... First scene of Ascension Kratos had nasty cuts all over his abdomen.

I ment I thought it was a 8/10. Though not because it was challenging. Adam Sessler is an idiot.

The patch would thus have the effect on all difficulty levels as opposed to what Todd Papy mentioned about hard level remaining on hard. So I'm not updating it until I finish the SP on Titan. This change should have been due to the large number of harsh responses to which SSM finally decided to go this route.

Love these ones, feels like Uncharted :D

GOW2 HD pics, but not from HD collection.  Screens are not 16:9