PS3 Games Review

Like the miles of mire that play backdrop to Perseus' quest to overthrow the rulers of Olympus, Clash of the Titans is a dull and haggard experience. A rich tapestry of myth is pushed aside to make room for repetitious bloodletting, laborious item collection, and overcomplicated and unrewarding weapon upgrades. The result is a game punished by its own unpruned ideas that quickly devolves into familiar but uninspired hack-and-slash gameplay. This is an uphill slog and another poor game that attempts to ride the leather loincloth coattails of its original source.

There's a lot of content in Clash of the Titans, but the 20 hours it takes to reach the conclusion of this derivative adventure are far too repetitive to hold your attention for very long. The game offers a mostly faithful adaptation of the movie plot and plonks you in the sandals of Perseus, Zeus's mortal son, who is caught in the centre of some nasty infighting between the gods. Baying for blood, you seek revenge for the murder of your adopted family by the lord of the underworld, Hades, who is intent on teaching humanity a lesson in submissiveness.

Problems begin once you realise there's no way to switch targets manually in lock mode. Your only option is to release the trigger, rotate the camera to the next foe, and hope you don't snap back to the previous enemy. Knocking them into the air with a swipe of your blade usually maintains your lock on them, but sometimes doing so removes your ability to see their colour status. This then forces you to release and re-target them to determine when you can steal their souls. Damage status is visible only while targeting, and the game camera is prone to freak out when locking on to foes perched above or below eye level. It's also not uncommon for the camera to obscure targets behind environmental objects, leaving you open to attacks from behind as you attempt to wrest back control while framing the action.

A veritable buffet of torture devices is available for dispatching your enemies, spanning everything from bone scythes, fiery magical powers, and ornate bows, to freshly plucked scorpion tails. Only four weapons can be equipped at any time, and you use the D pad to switch between them on the fly. Menu navigation is long-winded and needlessly complicated, requiring multiple submenus and scrolls to make changes and equip items. This clumsy handling becomes a major source of pain late in the game when certain enemy objects can be destroyed only with particular weapons. Trial and error is the only way to find the appropriate tool for the job, and often the weapon or item is used only once for its specific need before being returned to your weapons cache. Moments like these drag you out of the action as you're forced to fumble through lists of objects to find the one that destroy an object to stop monsters from endlessly spawning.