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March is the month for platform exclusive prequels it seems, and from Sony's Santa Monica studios comes a real belter of a slash-em-up. As the developer's second major foray on PlayStation 3, God of War: Ascension renders out the early days of perpetual angry-man, Kratos, and gives us a chance to see where the team's penchant for striking, mythic backdrops has taken it this time. It may be back to square one for the leading demi-god, but a calm before the storm this most certainly is not.Though perhaps less muscular in his younger years, the lengthy demo shown during Sony's E3 2012 conference revealed just how early on our Spartan hero started up with the whole limb-lopping act. Now that we've had some time with the 715MB demo ourselves, we're more clued in on how the game's tech has been tweaked from its use in God of War 3 too - itself a strong indicator of where things may stand for the final release.
Onto the basic setup then: rather than overhaul the engine built for the last game - costing circa $44m for Sony to produce in the first place - subtler tweaks are in order for Ascension. Clearly an ongoing evolution of ideas, series director Sig Asmussen seemed convinced towards the end of the last game's production that "there's a lot more we can do with it". He highlighted improved animation blending systems in particular as one of the big steps forward for any future release that may come to be, declaring "we just didn't implement it in God of War III because it came in real late."
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