God of War (2018) (PS4) (Santa Monica Studio)
0Sony Santa Monica's reboot of God of War is beautiful to look at (especially on an HDR-capable screen), and the combat nails that visceral element of earlier entries in the series despite radical changes to the mechanics. I'm not too fond of the shoulder-hugging, RE4-style camera (which frequently makes it difficult to tell what's happening both in front of Kratos and behind him), and it's also been challenging to adjust to the animation priority and sheer weight of our Greek anti-hero's new movement schemes. I have died *a lot* during my first few hours with the game, but that might admittedly have more to do with my bad habit of choosing needlessly high difficulty settings than with the game's controls. The new GoW actually reminds me a bit of last year's Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice - both games prominently feature Norse mythology and vaguely Scandinavian environments while sticking to a close third-person perspective throughout both story sequences and tense combat encounters (heck, they even have spatial rune-based puzzles in common...).