God of War: Sons of Sparta Review – With It or On It

Sony’s latest State of Play was full of surprises that players weren’t expecting from both old franchises and now, but perhaps the most unexpected was a new God of War title developed by a studio about as far as you could get from Santa Monica Studio’s AAA pedigree: Mega Cat Studios. A retro-first developer that’s made some of the latest titles to be released for the Sega Genesis and NES, the concept of Cory Barlog lending out the likeness off Kratos to another indie studio was something players would have never expected from 2026’s Sony Interactive Entertainment, where so many of their signature exclusives either dabble in live service or the cinematic and thousand-man-hour graphical powerhouses. God of War: Sons of Sparta represents a radical take on Kratos’ origin, but does this trip to Laconia appeal to more than just series tourists?

On the surface, God of War: Sons of Sparta shares so little with the namesake beyond a tattooed Kratos spending his afternoon whittling a gift for his daughter Calliope and sharing a story from his past. Strip these sentimental moments of narration, and you’re left with a Greek tragedy that could have just as easily been told about any other two Spartan brothers without dipping into the rich lore of David Jaffe and Cory Barlog’s franchise. The Olympian gods and the gifts they bestow sight unseen fit the Metrovania formula without anything that feels inherently linked to God of War.

Beyond the shaky ties binding Kratos and his brother Deimos to this Greek tragedy is a rather memorable story about the brotherhood of Spartans and how abandoning one means abandoning Sparta. Kratos’ journey is a rather simple one on the surface: find out what happened to fellow cadet Vasilis and safely bring them back home. Along the way, there are a few other Spartans who help guide and shape Kratos’ first formative adventure, but none have the same staying power in the story as Deimos. The two constantly banter back and forth like a straight man and funny man Manzai routine, with Kratos usually playing the stoic, serious older brother. Yes, there is a co-op mode here as promised by the developers, but it already has two strikes against it: it isn’t unlocked until after beating the game for the first time, and is limited to a select number of combat challenges for the brothers to overcome. 

What can make or break an explorative platformer comes down to two core systems: exploration and how players interact with the environment, whether it’s by way of combat or solving emergent puzzles ala Rain World and Animal Well. The first is something I do have to applaud Mega Cat Studios for: trying something new with the franchise, even if it felt heavily bloated by the end of the 30 hours I spent running through Laconia's various biomes. New abilities are provided at a regular clip, with new gifts bestowed by the gods upon Kratos, which all serve a dual purpose of traversal and murder.

Long before he was “gifted” the Blades of Chaos, Kratos was a proud Spartan of the Agoge and only knew discipline with the spear and shield. As the single weapon used during the adventure, the options at the player’s disposal are quite limited compared to what one might expect from a God of War prequel. Among the two types of resources Kratos can spend on attacks is Spirit, a type of energy that augments almost all of his attacks to deal less damage but builds up a separate stun counter for that enemy. Fill it, and the enemy is left wide open for a Brutal Kill, perhaps the single most inspired by God of War above everything else that can be found in Sons of Sparta. 

One thing that made the franchise so memorable was the dynamic combat, giving Kratos so many different tools to murder his foes. Scaling it all down to a single weapon not only limits that freeform combat but also reduces it to something that doesn’t fit into the greater ethos of the series. Even with the various gifts he receives from the gods, combat feels largely stiff and is at odds with the concept of what Kratos will eventually become. Enemies, especially in the later biomes or when Kratos’ level is lower than his foe’s, are HP sponges that simply take too long to dispatch. What’s intended here is to use your regular attacks to fill your spirit gauge and then hold down R1 to augment your strikes to deal additional damage (and recover a small amount of health in the meantime). I get that Mega Cat Studios is trying to combine the orb fountains of earlier God of War games with the deliberate flow of something like DooM Eternal, where each attack is intended to recover a certain resource or be more effective against a specific enemy type. Unfortunately, without the careful balance of these other titles, not playing the way the devs intended just makes routine fights drag on and pad the runtime.

What I have to give the developers credit for is how the different biomes of Laconia slowly open themselves up to the player. Out-of-reach platforms and one-way obstacles are routinely scattered around the critical path for players to pass by the first time they traverse through the expanse biomes, only to return much later in the campaign with the requisite tools to do so. Sometimes players will get a gift and learn how to use it for traversal through emergent gameplay rather than just explicitly telling players outright exactly what every tool is used for (although there are more than plenty of tutorials to stop players if you want the signposting). One that wasn’t immediately apparent was that I assumed I was missing something crucial, where a variety of trees were scattered around Laconia, each bearing a single fruit. Since I couldn’t cut them free or otherwise interact to pick them off the vine, I assumed they were intended for a side quest, and I wouldn’t be able to gather them otherwise. It wasn’t until by pure accident that I tried plucking and sucking the fruits off the branch with the same suction powers granted to the Lycurgus Bust that was used much earlier in the adventure to gather up noxious fumes to traverse safely. 

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Midway through the adventure, Kratos will get a signature upgrade to take a snapshot of the room he’s in and create a catalog of points of interest when stumbling across an obstacle that takes a tool he’s otherwise missing. Granted, this was something I had first seen in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, but I am excited to see other developers embrace the feature as we’re well past the days of having to draft out maps and plot out points of interest by hand. Each biome also has its own discrete list of objectives and collectibles, so no needing to scour the entire world map just to find one iron bar you’re missing for the last craftable recipe.

If anything would detract from the exploration of God of War: Sons of Sparta beyond the combat, it would be the sheer length of the adventure. Most of the Iga-developed Castlevania titles can be comfortably finished in around 8-10 hours, depending on your appetite for completion. Here, with the adventure running triple that length with far less enjoyable (even if more mechanically complex) combat, I was eager to roll credits before I even hit the twenty-hour mark. For $30, players will certainly get their money’s worth, even if the adventure isn’t as refined as the pixel art would show.

God of War: Sons of Sparta is a perfectly fine Metrovania on its own, but it doesn’t live up to the Kratos lineage otherwise. Either temper your expectations for Kratos’ origin story, or go into this one with an open mind that it’s another generic Greek adventure, and you won’t find your time in Laconia to be a tragedy.

[Editor's Note: God of War: Sons of Sparta was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Review code was provided by the publisher.]

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