It’s a big year for Sony, and the company is about to come out swinging. Swinging a massive, rune-carved axe, to be specific. God of War isn’t out until April 20, but I and the rest of the gaming press will be giving you our reviews much earlier than that: the review embargo for the game lifts at 12:01 PST on April 12, meaning that you’ll be able to read the thing when you wake up this Thursday. It’s probably Sony’s heaviest-hitting exclusive PS4 game since Uncharted 4 came out in 2016, and the company is hoping that it could be a big new introduction to one of its tentpole brands.
God of War is a reboot for the long-running mythological battler, which was fairly necessary considering there were really no major figures in Greek mythology left to kill. We meet up with series protagonist Kratos a few years on in his life, with the beard, son and haggard face to prove it. He’s living now in mythological Scandinavia, which means there are Trolls, Draugr, and an entire new pantheon of immortals to slaughter. It also makes some crucial changes to the combat to match Kratos’ new, world-weary visage — the camera is now pulled back right behind the main character, limiting the sorts of nimble acrobatics that defined the series until now. Gone too are Kratos’ signature Blades of Chaos, replaced instead with a setting-appropriate axe.
It’s best not to read too much into review embargoes, but you can glean a little bit about how a company expects a game to perform by how generous they are. If a developer doesn’t give out review copies until launch, it generally means one of three things: that it’s an online game that can’t be adequately evaluated before release, that the company doesn’t expect it to review very well and is trying to limit the damage, or that it’s being published by Bethesda. For single-player games, it’s much more standard to give reviewers a week or so of lead time — oftentimes less — and then set the review embargo for midnight on release day.
With God of War, however, Sony has distributed review copies far in advance of the release and set a review embargo a generous eight days ahead of launch — something you very rarely see outside of Nintendo. It means that Sony is feeling confident about the reviews and wants to use them to build hype for the game ahead of launch. It’s a good sign, generally, so look forward to seeing what we’ve all got to say when the embargo lift. For me, it’s back to slaughtering ogres with my nice new axe.
