A brand new 2D Metroidvania entry in the God of War series.
What Is It? You are a teenage Kratos training to be a Spartan warrior alongside your brother Deimos. You recently received the honor of being able to leave Sparta and freely roam the surrounding lands and thus begins a quest to find a missing cadet across the land’s various areas.
Before diving in, I have to call out that the entire Sons of Sparta experience was a “tale of two games” situation for me. I spent 24 hours with the game before seeing the credits and the bulk of the first 10-12 of those hours were incredibly mundane. I won’t spoil any specifics but there are certain abilities that you unlock well into the game that really open things up so the second half is a pretty good Metroidvania experience.
Sons of Sparta is a fairly by-the-books Metroidvania, specifically a combat-focused entry in the genre. These games have a familiar gameplay loop of allowing you to explore one section of a large map at a time, each of which inevitably leading to some kind of ability or item upgrade which allows you access to a new area where you can do it all over again. Each area you visit also contains many spots you can’t reach the first time through as they rely on abilities/items you unlock later. Repeat this cycle a bunch of times until the map is filled out, and you have yourself a classic Metroidvania.
From the start, Kratos is able to attack with his spear, dodge, and execute a block/parry move. You will augment this moveset with some items and more advanced moves as you unlock them in your playthrough.
While you will eventually have some ranged attack options, the focus here is melee combat with your spear. It feels okay. The parry timing is something I never quite got a handle on, always seeming to miss on one side or the other. The overall combat felt clunky as I would inevitably end up smashing the spear attack and trying to dodge through the enemies. This would either work out fine or be a total disaster, depending on the type of enemies I was against in any given room.
Bosses are always a focal point in the genre, and Sons of Sparta does well there. There are quite a few bosses across the 20+ hour game and most of them present a pretty tough, fun challenge. Die a few times to learn the patterns of each stage of the fight, then finally put it all together to defeat it, a fun cycle in an action game like this.
Beyond combat, platforming and exploration are typical tropes of Metroidvanias. Sons of Sparta has very basic platforming. You are limited to a jump and a wall jump on specific walls most of the game, but this does open up later on. None of the platforming is anything special, and there are occasionally bad parts such as annoying delays in the wall jumps, but it mostly all does the job.
The exploration side is pretty strong. Each area has a bunch of different paths to take, often blocked by an ability you’ve yet to unlock. There are plenty of side areas to discover which can help upgrade your items or simply provide currency to be used to advance your skill tree. The game also provides a marker on the map for where you need to go next to advance the story, which, to me, is always a welcome addition.
The pixel style art is executed well, but I’m not a big fan of the actual look of it. Pure personal preference here, but nothing really jumps off of the screen in this game and those eye-popping moments are a crucial part of the series’s legacy.
The Best Part: The game plays into the Greek portion of Kratos’s past games well. You will crack treasure chests, perform finishers, and collect a few different colored orbs throughout the game. Green to heal, red as upgrade currency, blue to file a magic meter, and yellow to fill a spirit meter. The spirit meter can be consumed by attacking a certain way, doing so will make the enemy drop health orbs and build up their stagger meter to eventually allow for an execution. This is all extremely true to the early games in the God of War franchise. It is tied together by getting to see a different side of Kratos, both as a boy during gameplay and talking to his daughter while telling this story. The game smartly pulls on the God of War memories and longtime fans of the series are bound to appreciate those aspects.
The Worst Part: The pacing. It’s rare that I noticed pacing in video games because something like 95% of them fall into the “good enough” category. Occasionally, a game will absolutely nail how it rolls out new moves, items, enemies, levels, etc…, but mostly games do a good enough job here to not notice either way. Sons of Sparta is one of the rare few where the pacing almost ruined the game for me. I was ready to quit when my save file was sitting at 13 hours and some change. The game rolled out a bunch of decent mechanics that didn’t actually change how you played the game much at all. It didn’t lean into the puzzles the items enabled, it kept raising the difficulty of the enemies to the point where the most effective use of my time was to roll through them onto the next screen whenever possible. It was maybe the worst of all video game experiences possible; boring. The game opens up rather quickly at one point as some things start to fall into place, the game remembers it’s fun to actually kill enemies instead of having even the most basic foes drain half of your health, and so on.
The Verdict: What a conflicting experience God of War Sons of Sparta was. The back half absolutely sings as a pretty good Metroidvania, a genre I absolutely love. Getting to play as a young Kratos, running around exploring, fighting, platforming, tackling challenges, etc… is a mashup I never thought I would see and it pays off over the last half. To get there, however, you have to get through 12ish hours of a completely forgettable, combat-heavy Metroidvania. It probably says a lot that the ability which improved my experience more than any other was one that helped you elude enemies. Even in the back half, the common enemies were not very fun. The boss fights were epic and generally quite good, but I loathed seeing a few bad guys while running through the levels up until the end. They are all hit sponges with strange parry windows and a color-coated attack system that doesn’t add a whole lot.
Before wrapping up here, I have to mention some bugs. The most notable that I encountered was late in the game the map would become unusable due to glitchy panning. A full game close and restart fixed this for me, but I’m not confident it won’t happen again. Others have reported issues going for the platinum trophy, I encountered a couple of stuck load screens late in the game as well. Presumably, this all gets ironed out in updates, but I did experience some glitchy behavior while I played shortly after release.
Should you play Sons of Sparta? I have no idea. If you are looking for a good Metroidvania, there are plenty of better options. Ditto if you’re looking for a good God of War. If you want to combine those, this is the only game in town. It is a legitimately fun game by the time it’s through, to the point where I am likely going to stick around to get the platinum trophy. However, it’s nearly impossible to actually recommend somebody purchase a game where the front half is about as mundane as the genre gets.
I guess I’ll land here: I don’t regret purchasing God of War Sons of Sparta and I enjoyed many hours of my playtime, but I can’t actively recommend it to anyone given how bumpy the overall experience was.
How to Play: PlayStation 5
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