God of Mario

I've recently been playing the PS2 game, God of War. All in all it's a great game that balances fighting with puzzle solving fairly well.

The fighting is mostly button mashing, but has some nice pay offs with certain combos and finishing moves. Here the game adds a twist. With certain foes a mini-game is required to get the big finish, which gains you more experience or magic. The puzzles are fairly easy, but still entertaining and give a nice alternative to the action.

My big complaint is that some of the areas require a ton of platform jumping. Let me state for the record, I hate, hate, HATE platform jumping. I hate it with the burning passion of a thousand dying stars. IMHO, making a player jump between moving platforms while dodging spinning blades is just game designer laziness. Stages that have ridiculously hard platform jumping is just a way to add challenge to a game without using any originality.

While the vast majority of the game rocks, there are definitely moments of controller-smashing frustration (a first time for me, as I have a trip to Wal-Mart in my near future). These moments don't ruin the overall experience though (as it has in other games - ), so it gets a high recommendation.
Maybe my hatred of platform jumping simply stems from my lack of 12 year old hand-eye coordination...