Let the button mashing and bloodletting commence just watch out for a nonsensical plot and hair pulling puzzles.
Onto God of War II, which is a familiar creature, as it shares much of the same mechanics and themes with the first and so this review would be fairly short if it weren't for some parts that, well, brings out the Kratos in me.
Visually and the main smashing-evil-monster-face bits are still just as nice and sweet. I would really like to be just be able to say this is just as wonderful as the first, except there are a lot of design decisions that confuse and/or frustrate.
The first offender goes to the plot. Now I know that the plot in a spectacle brawler is not exactly essential but the plot here is all over the place, confusing and the worse part is that it could have had achieved its main points without having to resort to bad storytelling. Let me demonstrate its madness as the plot runs as follows, Kratos has gotten annoyed at having sat on the throne remembering his terrible misdeed and uses his favourite spartan army to start trashing Greece. This doesn't bode well with the other gods and Zeus kills him. Hell doesn't really bother a bad ass like Kratos and so he crawls out and swears revenge. With help from the Titan Gaia he discovers that he can change what happened by talking to the sisters of fate to go back in time to stop Zeus at the moment of his betrayal.
Oh dear lord is this daft, was time travel really necessary to achieve all the story points they require for game number 3 to work? Time travel is a bad mechanic to use unless you are going to apply to to every level of the game, otherwise its an awful crutch to solve plot issues. The plot is effectively all set up in the first gameplay section (it also would have been nice to actually kick arse around Greece and be the bad ass everyone on Olympus seems to think you are) and the rest of the game is just a corridor where I often forgot why I was going to a particular section of temple until I hit the big 'rearrange the level' lever. To achieve its plot aims simply saying that you've lost you godly powers, here go get this shiny Epic item to be able to take on Zeus and free the titans would have been fine.
On a similar note is the introduction of various heroic NPCs which merely turn up say two lines of dialogue, piss off Kratos and die in a boss battle. A bit of depth and some build up would have been nice.
Next on the moan list is the levels, not the level design itself, they are all very cool, its just they seem to be there because they look cool, not because it makes sense. You are mainly wandering the island of the fates where you will find yourself in differently themed levels that don't really make sense next to one another. The worst offender is the Atlas level which seems to only exist to demonstrate the new jumping ability and show off the vast expanse of the level rather than for any particular plot purpose.
The last offender before I round this off with something nice stuff goes to the puzzles. Most are simply annoying, some just seem to be built to antagonise the player. The best example I can give is a puzzle where you are looking for a weight for a switch, you've up until now used nothing but pillars/rocks, this one turns out requires a dead body which has never been a mechanic or mentioned before now. I must have spent 10 minutes until I resorted to looking it up on the intertubes and realising that out of all these hanging rotting bodies is only a slightly different looking dead body you can carry. This pales in comparison to the sections where it mixes combat and puzzling which are almost without exception rage inducing. Trying to move pillars or interact with objects are really hard to do while fighting re spawning/awkward enemies. These sections usually comes down to plain luck to finish or mass repetition before you snap your controller in two.
A final happy note, there are some fun flying sections that do make a nice break from the usual action and the new slowdown and other tricks are, most of the time, well implemented
Summary
If you can ignore the plot and narrative issues, struggle through the bad puzzles and you liked number one then you can't go wrong with God of War II.
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