I feel really quite bad for admitting this (especially so soon after saying the same thing about Ratchet & Clank, I have a feeling I’m about to get written off as an Xbox fanboy), but despite giving it a lot of time, God of war 3 is boring me.

I am pretty sure it is all to do with scale and scope.

God of War looked amazing for a PS2 game, and had some spectacular vistas and fights that ran at a good frame rate. Fighting gigantic monsters, killing gods, seeing whole cities burn to the ground in the distance – it was impressing people on technical and artistic levels, both at the same time.

But now, I have killed my way through a dozen or so gods, and the novelty of punching straight through the face of another is wearing a little thin. Which one did I just kill? Who am I pissing off now? This has the run-on effect of when the next boss makes himself known and threatens to destroy you, there’s no thrill there any more. I know I’m going to tear his arms off and make him eat them. It’s happened to many times before for any other outcome to be possible.

And on a technical level, what God of War does is no longer that impressive. The hardware has become a great leveller. Dozens of games have shown me spectacular battles between huge armies. Draw distances are regularly further than even the most bionic of men could see. Showing that I’m having a fight on the back of a lump of rock that’s slowly climbing up a mountain doesn’t blow minds any more.

There are also some very odd choices of framing, I thought. Making my character really small on screen for extended periods doesn’t make me feel that the scene is epic, it just makes it hard to play when I’m sat at the proper distance from my TV.

When the camera pulls right out as you traverse the sword bridge in God of War it pulls right back in again. This section is also linear (you can only go two, opposite, directions on the bridge) and there’s no combat during it. These are all reasons why it works. Pull the camera right back, allow me more freedom of movement, and throw a bunch of enemies in to the mix, and I can’t make out what’s going on.

All of this is not to say it’s a bad game, and I feel kind of churlish for complaining about it. Maybe my expectations were too high, having been blown away by the previous God of War titles. I’m not really sure what I was expecting from it, and it does follow the existing God of War recipe to a tee. The combat and puzzling-lite are the same as before, and they have improved the readability of the quick time events by showing the face button icons on the edge of the screen that corresponds to their arrangement on the pad.

I think I was just kind of expecting something else. Or something “more”.