Ares had given Kratos great power in exchange for serving him, but he also tricked the Spartan general into killing his own family. In the first God of War (2005), Athena recruited Kratos to kill Ares, the titular deity. It's hard to escalate things when a story has run its course so the developers at Santa Monica Studio did the only sensible thing: they went for the prequel.
When last we saw our protagonist Kratos in God of War III, the grunting, pale-skinned, chain-sword-wielding Spartan was putting an end to the reign of the gods by chopping Zeus himself into pieces. Whether you enjoy more of the same in this latest instalment depends on whether or not you're tired of that premise. It's the same thing we've seen over three core games in the franchise so far: gory hack-and-slash action set in the, literally, epic world of the Greek pantheon. Any time a game publisher puts out a sequel that's a lot like the last one, they're tempting fate – will people buy it because they want more of what they know, or will they give it a pass for that very reason? God of War: Ascension is the perfect example of game that has to answer that question.