Hero of Sparta

Though God of War knockoffs litter the retail and digital shelves, the portable market has not yet reached critical mass on the number of games that encourage the most gratuitous kills possible. Hero of Sparta attempts to rectify this, and did so on the and PSP and specifically on the iPhone, where the God of War franchise had not yet clenched its dreaded talons. Hero of Sparta also happens to be alone on the DSiWare Shop, where little has been done to imitate the action-game formula.

And on a very superficial level, the DSi version of the game does indeed succeed at bringing the sort of action that players expect from those games onto a much less powerful machine. The DSi version brings with it the cinematic kills -- yes, done with the Simon Says timing of quick-time events -- and two-button combat that is part and parcel with games of this sort.  
 
 As Argos (simply the greek hero or the actual god I can't really tell), you'll travel to equally scenic and dangerous locations in order to progress your quest, which I never really figured out. You walk from objective to objective, bashing enemies with various greek-oriented weaponry. So yes, it unapologetically takes its cues from the giants in the genre, and it does technically work.

But it does all of these things in the most boring way possible. Combos add nothing to the combat save for the fact that reaching a hit count of 10 -- a very easy task -- increases your damage output. Once you gain access the two-handed sword, you can pretty easily trap enemies in a near-infinite combo. Not one they've engineered, mind you, but one I found by pressing the attack button, moving a step, and attacking again. After this, the game didn't seem very difficult. 

I don't know what I would've done had that combo not existed, though. On the default normal setting, the difficulty tended to range from mind-numbingly boring to obtuse and frustrating. Healing fountains are frequent enough to recharge you from encounter to encounter, but those don't really help when one encounter lasts much longer and throws way more enemies than it should. Even the 90-minute length didn't stop the game from being much too boring to merit playing or being much to maddening to care about. 

The shifting perspectives help to distract from the dryness of the environment, but neither the overhead nor side-scrolling views don't help alleviate the monotony of the game.There's also no sense of exploration; God of War was linear, sure, but at least there enough things outside of the beaten path to make it seem as though you had a choice in your journey. Hero of Sparta constantly points in the correct path, and the "collectibles" are all along the incredibly straight line you'll be following throughout the course of the game.

As much as I hate to say it, part of what makes so many people love God of War is its sense of scale, and for lack of a better phrase, production values. The gratoitous battles work because the animations are fluid, and the monsters you're ceaselessly murdering die realistically, given the over-the-top nature of those games. Because none of the boss battles or storytelling nails this key aspect, Hero of Sparta is exactly what most have written off as; a derivative bandwagon product that just doesn't get the "vibe" right. 

It might not be fair to compare Hero of Sparta to what's regarded as the standard for third-person action games, but it's difficult not to when the game itself does so at every turn. Even on a market as untapped of the DSi Shop, Hero of Sparta fails to offer anything worthy of its 8 dollar cost of admission; if you've got those DSi points still lying around, there are better games to spend them on.