God of War Multiplayer Beta Impressions

This past weekend Sony opened the God of War: Ascension multiplayer Beta to all PSN users in one final push to test out the system. I was able to race in there about mid-day on Sunday to check it out for myself, and I'm glad I did. Though we've been on a bit of an anti-MP kick here at 4Player -when it came to games like the new Tomb Raider, Hitman:Absolution, and Dead Space 3- I was interested in the melee focused gameplay. Especially considering how much screen time Anarchy Reigns has been getting on our feed lately.

So how did it stack up overall? Well, it's a mixed bag.

I played three different game modes during my time in the beta. A routine capture the flag mode, an arena deathmatch and a titan mode where your focus is to destroy or protect titans that are in a central position of the map. The one level available for CTF and Titan modes was a multi-leveled area with healing pools, environmental dangers and multiple pathways to goals. Overall, the play areas were well engineered and allowed the player to enter the action from multiple angles while never running too far to find the action in the first place. Environmental hazards -such as spikes or fire from the ground- were especially fun to use, and sometimes required two people to use correctly (e.g. one person to pull the levers in question and the other to actually kick the enemy into the hazard).

The arena level, on the other hand, was a single-level circle with spikes surrounding the outer limits, and was quite drab in comparison. And nothing nearly as interesting as the arena level in Chivalry. One could get to an alcove of the arena that lets off a series of arrows from above, but getting to that alcove is rare since the small size of the play-area means you'll mostly be fighting your way through 4 or more players just to get anywhere.

God of War: Ascension multiplayer is fast. Really fast. It's as fluid as the gameplay of the single-player game which deludes the expectation one might have when looking at the severely pumped character models you'll be using. The speed of this feels manageable when fighting one other player, but as soon as two or more players jump in the entire thing falls to pieces, and this is the central problem with the multiplayer. Things become a clusterfuck almost immediately.

It got to the point to where as soon as I was attacked by any more than two players I could just set down my controller and refresh my drink waiting for the respawn button to appear. Once the blows from multiple people start reigning down there is very little one can do to stop it. Even another teammate getting involved doesn't do much since you can find yourself stunned fairly easily, and even the act of getting up after being knocked down takes too long in comparison to the fast attacks of your enemy.

Getting in a good parry while being attacked is the absolute best defense, and can turn the tide of a fight very easily when one-on-one. But this only works well in one-on-one. A parry while facing two players is easily dealt with as player two waits a moment to get in the next blow. Two-on-two is not much better, as things just become a storm of punches, pulls and magic attacks to the point to where you won't even be able to have a good bead on your own character. You'll die, or win, and have no real clear sense as to why.

Keep in mind that the small area level I mentioned earlier can hold up to eight players. Yikes.

I understand that they wanted the flow of the MP to mimic the singleplayer experience, but a multiplayer fight requires movements and attacks that are slower, more technical. The back and forth of one-on-one in the beta begins to touch on that, and I've had some great fights with one other player as we parried back and forth, or one of us had to run for a health pool while the other tried to run the other down. But this was invariably ruined by the experience of one to two more players getting in on the action and devolving the experience to a flurry of clusters and a storm of fucks.

Multiplayer melee is hard to do, but I think it's important that we learn to get it right. Unfortunately, the God of War: Ascension MP does nothing more than devolve into a button masher where whoever mashes the buttons more -and has the better armor and weapons- wins.