God of War Collection

God of War Collection brought two key chapters of the story of the Spartan warrior Kratos, who rebels against the gods of Olympus in ancient Greece, to PlayStation Vita. Both games are built on a combination of fast combat with chained blades, logic puzzles set within monumental temples, and spectacular battles against giant beings that often fill the entire screen. The combat is accessible yet has depth: the player combines light and heavy attacks, dodges, uses magic abilities granted by the gods, and gradually upgrades their arsenal. Boss fights culminate in sequences where you must press a displayed button or perform a gesture on the touchscreen at just the right moment.

The handheld port kept the essence of both games, including the meticulously directed camera work that leads the player through the environment like a film. The touchscreen took over the role of certain quick actions, and the rear touchpad handles additional gestures, a solution some players took longer to get used to. Technically it's a compromise; reduced resolution and less stable frame rates are noticeable, but the monumental mythological settings and the mighty orchestral score lose none of their power.

Reviews at the time welcomed the collection warmly, mainly because it was an extraordinarily valuable content package on a single card. Criticism was aimed at the technical side and at occasionally awkward use of touch. The God of War series fundamentally shaped the modern action-adventure genre through how it combined brutal action with grand direction, and its early entries rank among the best the genre had to offer at the time. On Vita, it's still a great way to go through the story that later received a very differently conceived sequel. For newcomers, it's also an ideal entry point, since both games maintain an understandable pace and explain their mechanics on the fly. Anyone familiar with the more modern take on the series will be surprised how different Kratos appears here: wrathful, uncompromising, and driven by revenge, without a trace of the reconciliation that came much later.