Clash of the Titans - Review Sony PS3

By the beard of Zeus! Perseus is on the PS3! A movie tie-in of epic proportions, Clash of the Titans mines the ever reliable depths of Greek mythology to bring a cornucopia of classical creatures to life and then swiftly to death. Encompassing a basic combat system that tries to emulate the hack-n-slash excitement of fellow Grecian Kratos, but falls short by lacking enough variety to make it more than casually engaging, Clash of the Titans is an entertaining but repetitive romp that'll certainly keep fans of the film happy.

Set during a period of unrest between the gods you play Perseus, the sandal wearing semi-god son of Zeus, in a quest to avenge the death of your father at the hands of the god of the underworld Hades, and stop him before he unleashes the terror of the kraken onto the world. At around 20 hours long, there is a significant amount of story available, and it stays mostly faithful to the film. Unfortunately most of the speech and character animation is decidedly iffy and the story and cut scene segments can look very amateur in places. Progress is made by tackling quests which involve finding objects or slaying monsters. These take place in arenas of sand and rocky scrubland, some of which you will visit multiple times on different tasks and as well as looking rather blocky and mundane, can often leave the player frustrated with how to progress as quests are often not explained properly. Still at least there are plenty of beasts to slay.

Equipped only with the option of a light or heavy attack you'll find yourself battling waves upon waves of respawning skeletons and floaty monocular monsters. The enemy AI doesn't provide much of a challenge and nearly every bad guy you'll meet can be dispatched by just hammering on the attack buttons. Combat is interspersed with some boss battles which do help to break up the button bashing of the normal fighting but unfortunately these are generally over too quickly. Utilising a rather unreliable lock-on system you can also target weaker enemies for special finishing attacks that drain their energy and add it to your own special attack meter, or steal their weapon adding it to your arsenal. There is a huge selection of weapon upgrades that you can also unlock but in honesty most of them do little to change the actual combat from hacking and slashing. Most of the alternative weapons are poor compared to the swords and you'll only really use them to smash particular obstacles such as boulders and the like that impede your progress.

The inclusion of a co-op multiplayer option means that a number of the games quests can be completed along with a friend. Playing with a sidekick does make the combat sections less monotonous as you'd expect however it does bring to the table some unfortunate camera issues with it not being able to frame both players and your opponents on the screen on the same time, leading to a lot of speculative slashing at where you think the skeletons are standing.

Clash of the Titans is not a brilliant game. But there is plenty of visceral combat to enjoy for those who don't mind the repetitiveness of the quests. Fans of the film will lap up its faithful reproduction of the stories characters and should find enough here to keep them entertained, though I doubt many players will see it all the way through to the end due to a general lack of variation throughout the game. The rather simplistic combat mechanics also don't help matters but will likely appeal to those who don't like the idea of memorizing button combinations and just want to see all manner of mythical beasts slashed to pieces in a variety of spectacular slow-mo finishing moves, and there's nothing wrong with that,

6.5 out of 10

Daniel Howard