God of War II
The second installment in the God of War franchise and exclusive for the Sony PlayStation 2 console. The game uses basics from the hack-and-slash genre, like its predecessor, and was developed by Santa Monica studio, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment. The game is recognized as one of the best for the console from Sony and the best game in action genre in 2007. The game was released on Sony Playstation 2 already at the moment when the third version of the console was already selling for four months. The developers explained their decision: one hundred million people already playing on PlayStation 2, whereas on the next-generation console gamers were just going to adopt the new hardware.
Key features
The player controls Kratos, who in the first part killed the god of war Ares and took his place. The game heavily relies on the ancient Greek mythology and uses it as inspiration and the main source for enemies and NPC design as well as locations design. However, the game is not a great source of accurate historical facts: Ancient Greece history was rewritten for the sake of the genre and the game universe, the rules of which were established in the first part.
The story
King of the gods Zeus betrays Kratos and kills him, but the Spartan is saved from the Underworld by another goddess Gaia, who invites Kratos to find the Sisters of Fate and go to the past and prevent his own murder. The gameplay remained the same: the player can use several attacks, which can be combined and improved with the help of the in-game currency collected from enemies. The game has a lot of Quick-Time-Events, mostly they are used in battles with bosses and in finishing combo-moves. Bosses in the game, in comparison with the first part, significantly increased.
