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God of War has never really had a problem with spectacle - this is a series with set-pieces that fling gods together with happy abandon, and one that toys with perspective and scale with dizzying ease and breathless pace. God of War's only real problem has been with the spectacles it's created itself - how can you trump battles that have consumed the heavens, and where do you go once you've felled Zeus? The beginning of Ascension provides an answer of sorts to Sony Santa Monica's perennial problem. First it hits the rewind button, sending Kratos back to his time as a Spartan, but more importantly it's drilled down into all the tiny details that help make up the epic vision.
It's there in the spectacular visuals, which are now so embedded within the world of God of War it's becoming dangerously easy to be blasé about them (Digital Foundry's recent tech analysis should snap you out of that soon enough, though). Regardless, Ascension once again manages to look like a painting, even if it's most definitely the kind of painting you'd expect to find on the wall of a slightly troubled GCSE classics student.
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