Through some good fortune I have recently been given a code for the God of War 3 demo, available when you purchase the God of War Collection, so I figured I would write a short impression about how I felt the game lives up to its predecessors with what we have so far.

The demo cuts right to the chase and there is no story element present. You are the mighty Kratos and you are currently trying to catch up to and presumably kill the god Helios. You kill anyone in your way regardless of if they are armed or not and sound very angry while doing so.

Fans of the previous games will have no trouble getting back into the gameplay of God of War 3 and most of the buttons were exactly as I remembered them from the first two. Kratos is armed with his blades on chains as usual and in the demo you are also given access to a pair of Cestus, which are like massive metal boxing gloves. The Cestus have this great weight and feeling of momentum about them and their lack of range made them feel completely different from the blades. One big difference with God of War 3 is that the quick-time event (QTE) buttons are now relegated to the sides of the screen. I thought this would be distracting. However, because the side of the screen the button appears on is based on the button's position on the controller, it allows you to focus a bit more on the action that the QTE is playing out, and you tend to use your peripheral vision to tell you what button to press next instead.

The other big change to the gameplay that I noticed was an increase in the number of enemies that you fight at any one time and therefore a greater focus on the ability to crowd control. One ability that is added to deal with these new masses of enemies is to grab an enemy and use them as a shield as you rush forward and smash into anyone in your way. This is particularly useful when you are faced with a large number of enemies in a small narrow space, such as a tunnel. The other crowd control ability that was showcased in the demo is being able to take control of large ogres and smash through enemies. Hopefully there are some more crowd control type abilities in the full game. All in all the gameplay felt a lot like previous iterations, but that's fine by me.

Visuals and sound effects didn't really stand out to me as anything particularly amazing, but there were some cool visual set pieces, such as the massive Titan doing battle with Helios. The style of the presentation is bang on to what you would expect for a God of War title, and I find that demos usually aren't nearly as technically impressive as the final retail product anyway, so I'm not worried about the visuals.

There were few surprises playing this demo, but then when you're playing the third main game in a series with an overarching storyline it seems unreasonable to expect massive gameplay changes. God of War 3 is shaping up to be a fun game, complete with the expected level of gore as you slaughter every creature and god from Greek mythology. I wouldn't have it any other way.