I stopped playing after the first couple of levels.
It certainly is beautiful but I preferred the first GoW. You could advance with a lot of button mashing and learning a few combos. I don't recall any kind of QTE either. One of the final levels of the original GOW, you see this giant god in the background as Kratos fights through grunts before getting to that final boss battle.
The original felt much more response. This one on the PS4, you can still mash buttons but just not as responsive. Arguably more fluid, but you can't instantly attack monsters coming from different directions.
I had a bit of a similar experience at first but this patch brought me back ... I left off at a pretty tricky fight with four types of enemies really forcing you to use different strategies, and it was hard to come back right into that after well over two years of not playing, though great that my save was picked up automatically. I also don’t really remember the difficulty I picked, but probably normal, but the fact that you can switch difficulty at any time is interesting, not in the least because that makes me want to try harder not to use that option.
But that fight definitely shows how different the game is. The game is way more deliberate and slow, requiring more thinking and less button mashing. In this one fight, one monster was basically immune to my axe, one monster had locking range attacks and splash damage and impossible to hit, two monsters who could kill me with just three hits, and two ranged fireball shooting monsters.
I think I retried this one like 10 times before I got it right, having to figure out again what Kratos can do and when he should do it. The ice monster was a piece of cake throwing away the axe and killing it with shield and fists, then avoiding the wraith as much as possible (who is also fierce in close combat) killing the brutes with dodging by rolling away and hitting them with a heavy axe attack (holding R2 I think), and the last bit can be finished off with the fast axe attacks, or once I also managed to throw them off the cliff, then killing the fire throwing demons with quick hits using shield and fists (as they are good at dodging) and finally figuring out that with circle I could get my ‘boy’ to fire several arrows after one another which helped to pin the wraith down for a brief while allowing me to hit it. Then there is the shield that can reflect hits back at the thrower a bit when well timed, the axe you can throw by holding R1 and aiming and have to recall with triangle afterwards, the berserk mode area attacks, and then the upgrading of your equipment etc.
What this means though is that up to this point the fighting and story progresses much less aggressively than in previous god of war games, which compensated a relative lack of depth to the gameplay with one set-piece after another in very quick succession, and the overal fighting speed was also much higher.
The more open spaces in this game where you don’t quite know where to go relatively early in the game also took getting used to and perhaps could have been better timed a bit later.
But it is a very different game and doesn’t hook you quite like the amazing God of War 3 did, but now I am getting the hang of the mechanics I am starting to enjoy the fighting a lot, and the graphics are getting better as well. Will be interesting to see where this goes, as clearly I am still only just starting (from the fact that there are still bits of tutorial, first time in a shop, crafting, etc).
And yes, true, you are so close to Kratos a lot of the time that you don’t get the high cameras that make crowd control easier. You have to rely more on your son and arrow indicators to anticipate attacks from behind etc.
