Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

There’s always a risk when you take highly valued intellectual property and hand it to a developer new to the series, and few IPs are more highly valued by Sony than God Of War. Their decision to produce a PSP game in the franchise and hand it over to Ready At Dawn — the proven developer of Daxter — is probably something that left some in-house PSP developers at Sony scowling, but the recent limited release of a UMD demo of Chains of Olympus shows it was most definitely the right decision.

Whether it came in the form of a handbook from Sony or the developers being intimately familiar with the high-energy action pacing of both God of War PS2 games, the messages have been received loud and clear and implemented by Ready At Dawn. From the opening of the game’s menu you are faced with Kratos’ slightly younger scowling visage and treated to music fitting for the battles ahead. You immediately launch into fights against troops on the ground in the midst of an invasion and get a quick tutorial on basic fighting controls. The level continues to steadily unravel more control options and moves as challenges present themselves, from the individual fighters teaching basic hits and blocking to a couple of boss fights introducing the familiar timed button-pushing mini-games and stressing the importance of dodging.

While the visuals are high quality for a PSP game and not as good as the technical masterpieces of the God of War titles on the PS2, the music is quite good, fast-paced, and already shows that it can change to fit the type of fighting going on. I was especially impressed with the fast percussion in the second boss fight up against the Persian king which highlighted how Kratos had to stay on the move and keep dodging. Overall the music is not as dark as it was in the PS2 games, but that may be for thematic reasons. Kratos is still happily in the employ of the gods, and while his deeds aren’t cheerfully executed he is not yet tortured by what would drive him in the PS2 games set after this one.

I felt the soldier fights were somewhat easier than the full-sized games but the boss fights were not. Fighting the basilisk was a little bit tricky and harkened back directly to the first part of the hydra fight in God of War 1 — you need to watch for the visual cues to dodge effectively and avoid being toasted by fire breath or eaten alive by its giant toothy maw.

There was some pixelation in the graphics when the camera pulled out to longer distances — such as the overhead view towards the end of the Persian king fight — and special effects were drawn over the screen like the red orbs flowing into Kratos as payment for dispatching his foes. I’d expect this would be taken care of as development is ongoing, and since the close-up action is spot-on and quite fun and that’s where nearly the whole game will be spent, I can see this not being a big problem.

Not only was I surprised as the quality and length of the demo, but I was even more pleasantly surprised to find a partial video walkthrough on the UMD led by someone at Ready at Dawn who took the time to explain important parts of the game. The kind of attention to detail in the game so far and in producing just the presentation aspects of the demo tells me a lot about Ready at Dawn’s efforts on this title. I already knew they could make a very high quality game with Daxter, but there really should be no doubt that they’re going to do a great job on God of War: Chains of Olympus.

Chains of Olympus is currently slated for a March 2008 release.