God of War HD is an “as long as it’s (kind of) pretty” game. The back-story is that God of War originally came about on the Playstation 2 game console. God of War HD came about as a means of having Kratos’ entire story on Sony’s current-gen system, the Playstation 3. This updated version of Kratos’ first game does little more than make the game prettier than it was before.

This third-person action/adventure, RPG makes use of stationary cameras which take control of camera angles out of players’ hands and sometimes leaves them trying to fight bosses and make their way through an environment that might not be the most advantageous for the person behind the controller. Although this is a positive for those that don’t benefit from using both sticks simultaneously.

Although not remap-able, the control scheme is setup in such a way that in most cases only one button will need to be mashed at a time - God of War HD is indeed a button-masher, and sometimes worse - more on that to come. Some combo and ranged attacks do call for a level of dexterity which may take some players out of the game, though combo attacks aren’t necessary to players’ success, and ranged attacks, if done quickly enough won’t present too much of a problem.

As mentioned above, God of War HD is a button-masher and sometimes even worse. Mashing face buttons is common practice, mashing shoulder buttons is also common practice, repetitiously moving the left stick back and forth is again, common practice, and rotating the left stick clockwise and counter-clockwise is not unbelievably common practice. This makes for a fairly immobile gameplay experience, but wait, there’s more, throw in quick-time events, and mobility impaired AbleGamers just don’t have all that much reason to bother with God of War HD.

Also on the pessimistic side of the Aegean is a lack of subtitling and captioning. The only time a player will see dialogue is when they find themselves in a position where they’ve pressed the R2 button when they’ve been signaled to do so leaving those AbleGamers with hearing impairments stranded in what might have been a great story that they’ll not know they’re in.

This leads to one of the few problems God of War HD faces, the dialogue boxes that appear when a new skill needs to be learned. These dialogue boxes feature brown font on a brown background with a font that is plenty large but not the clearest in which to read. While not the hardest thing to read, they are not quite the easiest thing to read either.

A bigger issue visually impaired AbleGamers may face are the camera angles. During boss battles the camera may be in a position where the player finds it hard to tell if they’re dealing any damage to their foe at all. While navigating terrain a key element to the player’s moving forward may be put in a position wherein it’s unclear where Kratos needs to be to interact with what he needs to interact with. Finally, and not necessarily completely the camera angles’ fault are the placement of buttons that need to be pressed to fulfill the requirements of a quick-time event which responsibility partially falls to the layout of the HUD.

The redeeming visual quality of the game is the lack of a lot of less-than color-blind friendly interaction with the only possible example being the intermingling of blood and vines.
If none of the above is deterrent enough to keep you from God of War HD, all that is left to say is “happy gaming”.

At a glance

Mobility
Control scheme is not remap-able.
One-handed playability will be determined by dexterity as only comb and ranged attacks call for more than one button to be pressed at a time.
Game is a button masher.
Repetitious mashing of one single button occurs a lot over the course of the game - takes place on both shoulder and face buttons.
Repetitious rocking back and forth, and clockwise/counter-clockwise rotation of sticks occurs often.
Recommended score of 4 out of 10

Hearing

Game features no subtitles or captioning
Recommended score of 1 out of 10

Visual

Awkward camera angles make boss battles, navigating environments, and quick-time events less-than favorable.
Menus easily read - usually a fairly high-contrast font/color scheme used.
In-game dialogue boxes occur in low-contrast making use of a large, not very clearly read font.
Recommended score of 7 out of 10