E3: God of War III Preview

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Enough talk of inner lives - on with the outer slaughter. This is now accomplished on the back of Titans, which serve as gigantic, moving levels-within-levels; using new weapons the Cestus (a pair of giant, stone, lion-headed gauntlets) and a fire bow; against up to 50 enemies at a time, who will fight as organised forces under commanders; and occasionally by mounting and controlling creatures like the Cyclops (lumbering "tank") and Harpy (airborne "helicopter"). And it's unstintingly bloody too, Kratos merrily (well, not merrily, it's not really his style) disembowelling Centaurs and ripping Cyclops' eyes out of their sockets in disgustingly glutinous detail.

Santa Monica Studio is aware that previous weapons have ended up second-stringers to Kratos' trusty Blades of Athena, so it's aiming to build equally balanced and rich move-sets for all of the new items, as well as creating moves that take advantage of the newly thronged battlefield. The fire bow sends panicked and flaming enemies cannonballing into each other, spreading fire like a virus. The up-close-and-personal Cestus clears the space around Kratos with thunderous ground-pounds.

The way Kratos creatively scythes through the hordes is reminiscent of what we've seen of the Barbarian in Blizzard's Diablo III. We won't be able to tell the quality of the new weapons until hands-on time, but the Cestus certainly packs a mighty punch on-screen, dealing hammer-blows with a smacking, slow, heavy rhythm, the John Bonham to the whirling blades' Jimmy Page.

Best of all, the weapons can all be hot-swapped, even in the middle of a combo, giving the player great freedom of expression in this medium of mythological murder. "What we're trying to do is make it so it's all very fluid," says Papy. "Making sure that the way the enemies react to those different weapons and the way Kratos reacts to those different weapons, everything feels very different, but yet there's that hint of 'if I push my normal combo, I'm going to get something that's somewhat similar, does roughly the same amount of damage'. It really just depends on how the player wants to fight."

In the demo, Kratos is in a race to kill the sun god Helios, screaming around in his chariot, before the fire Titan he's already fighting manages to do it. He rampages through a few waves of enemies - the dramatic camera, always one of God of War's strong-points, zooming in lasciviously for the hideously bloody confrontations with Centaur commanders. He faces down a Chimera mini-boss, a truly fantastic creation, a monstrous but magnificent blend of lion, goat and snake. The game's literary grasp of the myths may be light, but the visualisation of it in the art is vivid and powerful.

Chimera dispatched, Kratos shoots down Helios' chariot with a Ballista and heads for the crash site while an unimaginably huge Titan strides overhead. He rides Harpies, agitating them with his bow to flock them together into an air-bridge across a chasm. He sticks his blades into a Cyclops' brain, using them like joysticks to command the monster to smash Helios' defenders into paste. He approaches the wounded Helios and rips his head off.

Scale is everything, as long as it's beyond huge.

Helios' holy noggin will actually be a key item in the game - Kratos heads into a pitch-black cavern next and uses the head as a torch, discovering and blinding enemies before he kills them in a stroboscopic flash of combos. The final bit of gameplay we see is when our snarling hero somehow acquires a set of wings and leaps into an "Icarus ascent" - a high-speed travel mode that will cover lots of ground quickly. It's essentially an old-school twitch mini-game, Kratos racing up a tunnel dodging hazards, but very spectacular.

That's a redundant thing to write. The whole thing is very spectacular. God of War III is an astounding-looking game, rich in detail, animated with fluid abandon, saturated with rich colour and picked out in pin-sharp lighting and powerful effects. It's blindingly fast, and yet every frame looks like it was painstakingly composed by hand. It will surely be a PS3 showboat to surpass Killzone 2 when it launches.

But what impresses most about this demo is the sheer amount of incident. God of War may be a simple brawler at heart, but Santa Monica Studio's total commitment to variety and moment-to-moment showmanship elevates it. The entire thing is set-piece. It's clearly not about bang for your buck in these parts - it's just about bang, and to hell with the bucks. "For example, we hired a designer in June last year, he finished his first level in February," says Papy. "He spent roughly six months on a level, one level, and that's roughly 45 minutes of the game. Most studios won't spend that time. We have that luxury."

God of War III looks luxurious alright, a hedonistic indulgence of a game, expensive, dumb, beautiful and bad for you in the best possible way. For Sony, though, it's no indulgence - it's clearly some of the best money it will spend this generation. That's confidence, and it's justified.