God Of War was a frustrating and disappointing experience for me. Every time I started really getting into it, something would happen that would annoy me or sour the game in some other way. I'd get to a cool new setting and the game would have me do something dumb like a shitty insta-kill platforming segment. The game respawns enemies during combat encounters, which I'd be fine with normally, but instead of spawning in different enemies in different formations throughout different fights, it simply respawns the exact same enemies in the exact same spots, which makes combat feel like a slog when in combination with damage sponge enemies.
The final boss in this game is one of the worst final bosses I've ever played. Like a lot of the game, each phase was really cool in concept and got me very excited, only to let me down with how shitty they were to actually play. The game also crashed during the third phase, making me do the entire thing all over again.
While I disliked this game on a gameplay front, I vastly enjoyed everything else. The music and visuals were great for the PS2, and I liked the story a lot. I found myself impressed many times with some of the things the developers managed to pull off.
Despite all this, the 'game' half of 'video game' still matters a lot, and in this case I wasn't very fond of the game part. also i was planning to rate this game 3 stars but that fucking terrible final boss made me bring it down by half a star