To begin with, allow me to set the stage, to give you, the reader, a better understanding of why I chose this particular time to review “God of War 2.” Lately, I’ve found myself with a lot of free time on my hands and as any good gamer should, I’ve been using it to chug through some rpg’s I’ve never got around to before.

But if any of you are gamers like me, you are more interested in the story and character development in a game rather than sixty or seventy hour games that have a bad habit of abandoning any effort to tell the story once the player gets halfway through. This leaves the poor user to go level up for days on end without even a whiff of a cut-scene, to keep him trudging along the path of the very linear plot line.

I was in the middle of such a game, two actually, when I decided I’d had enough, and needed to vent my frustration at turn based combat out on some identical re-spawning monsters with wonderfully simple combo attacks. The kind a gamer can crank out as easy as breathing (My personal favorite being “square, square, triangle”).

My first choice was to pick up the latest “Prince of Persia” title, because he reminds me of Aladdin in a crusade-period planet terror dimension, where he’s forced to navigate a ruined city or castle to stop Jafar turning everyone into sand zombies, and what’s worse, he has to do it without breaking out into a single song. But I digress. When it became apparent my local video shop didn’t have it in stock, I landed on the “God of War” series, and didn’t look back.

Right from the get-go this game sets the tone as a gruesome, hack-and-slash adventure that doesn’t stop until the player feels as blood thirsty as our favorite albino spartan. Within the first four minutes the game explains to the player that if he can’t handle button-mashing quick-time events, he’s playing the wrong game. If you are at all unfamiliar with the layout of the playstation two controller, get ready to be bashed, bruised, and beaten by a 400ft statue of a young David Duchovny before you can say: “A whole new world”

Before I start on the graphics, storyline, or the repetitive consistent game play, allow me to say that “God of War 2″ was exactly what I expected, and it gave me everything I wanted out of it: ten hours of senseless violence that was delightfully immersive. The excellent voice acting of Terrence Carson in the role of the protagonist spartan “Kratos” creates a character so fully devoted to revenge even I found him surprisingly believable. For those of you who haven’t yet felt the urge to play a second game centered around ravaging mythical beasts, allow me to fill you in on the story line of “God of War 2″

Now that Kratos has exacted revenge on his former nemesis/master Ares, he sits on a throne on mount Olympus as the new God of war. Almost any other mortal would be content with this kind of promotion, but even a cyclops could see that Kratos is far too hardcore to sit around while his enemies still maintain use of all their limbs. Kratos abuses his godly powers to help his beloved Sparta conquer city after city, which incurs the wrath of Zeus himself, who proceeds to trick Kratos into draining all of his power into an ancient sword before he fucking murders him with it.

But fear not, in ancient Greece, death is hardly an absolute. Kratos died in the first game, and by golly that didn’t stop him. This time he is rescued by the titan Gaia and returned to the land of the living before he can even redeem his frequent die-er miles, and off he goes to find the sisters of fate, who Gaia assures him can help in his quest to kill the subject of every Greek myth you’ve ever heard of. Some of the big names Kratos meets, and ultimately kills in his blood-drenched assault on mount Olympus include Prometheus, Theseus, Icarus, as well as Jason, and some poor argonauts that got in way over their heads.

The rest of the game follows Kratos as he works through hordes of vicious beasties and ghouls, solving puzzle after puzzle, where the answer is invariably; “kill everything that moves, then hit the switch.” All in the name of vengeance. But don’t get me wrong, I really did enjoy playing through this game. My favorite puzzle included a room with a portal that could move you back in time. This portal was necessary to stop the suicidal monk who inhabited this room from jumping, and subsequently falling a bajillion miles to his death, to prevent Kratos from smashing his face into a sacrificial stone-book to proceed. Of course, if you’re like me, and this surprisingly innovative puzzle caught you off guard, then you had to listen to this gnarled lemming bastard scream: “You’ll never get my blood spartan! Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeee!!!!” approximately thirty times before you had the privilege of draining all of his blood out of his broken nose.

All in all, it was a very fun game, the graphics can’t wow you anymore, because it’s on a console thats a generation behind, and the game play is about as innovative as “Gauntlet legends” was. But, the hilariously one-dimensional character drives the plot, and the plot was different enough to keep me interested and entertained from start to finish. However, the ending loses points in my book for it’s abrupt attempt at a suspenseful cliffhanger, but now that “God of War 3″ has been announced, I’m finding it hard to stay mad.