Clash of the Titans
For: PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360
From: Game Republic/Namco Bandai
With the video game, which fails to hold any candle whatsoever to the God of War games that took the original movie's premise and lifted it wholesale, the failure is now complete.
In fairness to game, it doesn't appear to have nearly the same budgetary freedom as the film.
Most of Titans' storytelling takes place through the kind of static dialogue exchanges we expected from games 10 years ago, and most of those exchanges are bland, even by those dated standards.
They are more akin to receiving mission instructions in a World of Warcraft knock-off than playing what is supposed to mimic a sweeping epic that God of War started retelling five years ago, to exponentially more dazzling effect.
But the cheap feel hurts far more during the act of actually playing the game.
Dated graphics and absolutely pulseless environmental design are teamed with a patchy level structure that requires players to constantly backtrack into static hub towns to accept new missions that rarely show any more imagination than the dull lands that host them.
As should be expected from any game built around hack-and-slash swordplay, most of Titans' missions boil down to killing lots of enemies.
Unfortunately, on top of everything else, the combat feels entirely insufficient for being the centrepiece of the experience.
While Titans flashes some nice enemy design variety, most of them sport absurdly simple attack patterns and intelligence.
The controls are responsive enough, but hacking away at the same enemies ad nauseam is completely unsatisfying.
One thing Titans attempts, with some success, is to give players the ability to steal and, unlike most games, actually keep enemy weapons.
The number of takeable weapons is pretty high at more than 80, and Titans lets players upgrade any of them as they progress.
But even that variety isn't nearly interesting enough to counter the overwhelmingly dull action.
Titans is, at roughly 12-15 hours in length, at least twice as long as it should be, even if it had better mechanics.
Even the supremely polished God of War gets a bit old after eight hours or so, and Titans wears out its welcome roughly 10 times over by operating at such a low level by comparison.
