So like many people who played the original God Of War offerings I couldn’t wait until God Of War III came out. In fact it was more exciting to me than Christmas (mostly because my family doesn’t believe in exchanging gifts for Christmas but that’s not what this is about). Anyway, God of War III came out, but when I saw the $60 price tag I said, “I am not paying more than $40 bucks for any game new or used.” This philosophy has served me well over the years since games usually depreciate quickly anyway. Still I received a ten dollars off of any item coupon from a local retailer that I am some what fond of and I decided to splurge. I mean it was God of War III, it had to be amazing like the first 2 were right? There was no way they would release a game that was not really tested for play control and try to fix it with updates later was there? Well that’s exactly what happened. Although the first level, and demos put the games’ best feet forward, and were visually amazing, the game play after that reminded me of something only slightly more advanced than Mega Man II. You know, fall down, die, go to screen that tells you how much you suck, start from checkpoint, over and over again even on simple level stuff. If this was a forty dollar or less game, so be it, and yes I did download the updates. The point is that it looks great, but the play control sucks outright at certain points in the game. Since I spend a reasonable amount of money with this particular retailer they were kind enough to let me return it as an exception to their policy. I also only had the game for about 12 hours before I decided that I just hated it. I really did want it, and wanted to keep it, but this game is just sometimes outright frustrating to play. I feel like it was rushed to market, and that my worst fears about modern gaming systems were coming true through this game. Meaning that now that manufacturers can update software they are not really throughly testing everything before release. Game play and mechanics are simply not as important as the game looking good, and if people bitch they can fix it in an update right? Sorry, but at sixty bucks a game they need to do better on release titles. My advice is to wait until this game is forty bucks, and /or they release a ton of updates that unscrew the play control before getting it so wait at least 6 months. All of the problems I experienced were on the games’ easiest settings, they were not with combat, which was cool btw, they were in getting around the levels. Sure I didn’t expect the game to live up to all of its hype, but poor game mechanics are simply unacceptable.