If you are a fan of God of War, there is no reason to pass this one up.
The game plays nearly identically to God of War, with only a few minor exceptions. There is a single attack button. Tapping it will perform quick strikes while holding it performs heavy attacks. These can be used in several different orders to for combo attacks. While there is a decent amount of possible combos, it wasn't long before I found one that was the most effective and used it primarily. A second button below the attack can be used to block, but I really never found a need to use it. Either the enemies were too weak to bother blocking, or to strong and could break through your shield. When enemies are killed, they drop green, blue, and red orbs. The green gives health, blue supplies energy (used to power the game's single special attack), and red earns experience. The experience can be used to upgrade five different weapons found during the course of the adventure. The variety of weapons is nice, but much like the combos, I quickly found the one I preferred and stuck with it for the rest of the game. Movement is handled by an onscreen joystick which works well enough most of the time, but does have one minor problem. If you move your thumb off of the left screen while trying to move in that direction, the joystick disables itself until you place your thumb back in the center position then move it back to the left. This is only a slight annoyance and the rest of the controls work well. Against stronger enemies, you can perform finishing moves that award more orbs. When an enemy reaches low enough health, a prompt will appear above their heads. Activating it will zoom in and begin a cinematic button-press sequence. Pressing the buttons that appear around the screen will result in a brutal death scene. This is am awesome addition, but the order of the buttons never changes for each different enemy type.
It won't take long to finish the adventure, but some additions increase replay value. It probably took me around three hours to complete the game, but afterwards, a new difficulty is unlocked that allows you to start over with your fully armed and upgraded hero. There are also health and energy gems hidden around each level that increase your maximum totals for their respective stat. Actually, 'hidden' may be a bit of a stretch since most of them are placed directly in your path as you proceed through the game.
The story definitely isn't the game's strong suit. The point of it can best be summed up as 'the hero had nothing better to do'. As the adventure opens, you find yourself on the shore of an unknown island and wonder out loud where your ship and crew are. At the end of the first level, you meet a woman who claims to be trapped and needs your help. After this conversation, all thoughts of finding your crew are forgotten and the rest of the game follows your quest to free this woman. It doesn't help that much of the dialogue is some of the most groan-inducing I have seen in a while.
The graphics are quite impressive. The environments are full of color and detail. Each character model is easily differentiated from each other even on the small screen. Even though the game takes place on a single island, each level is very different than the last. Scattered throughout the game are some intimidating boss battles against huge creatures. All in all, this is one of the better looking iPhone game around.
If you are a fan of God of War, there is no reason to pass this one up. For those that haven't played GoW (all three of you), this is a great action game that can be a little repetitive, but remains fun throughout.