I wouldn't describe it as shit, but I'd have a hard time describing it as being anything more than "slightly above mediocrity". To comment on my primary concerns in no particular order, the enemy variety is abysmal, meaning you'll see almost everything the game has to offer in the first few hours and the enemy types that are there are not interesting enough to hold the combat up in and of themselves. Enemy attack properties literally changing depending on their relative level to you. For example, an enemy leveled above you might hit you with a move that's unblockable, and then the same enemy type might be a few levels below you, use the exact same move, and do a regular, blockable attack. The RPG mechanics also end up making combat feel unfair. Since enemy types are reused so heavily over the course of the game, you'll run into the same enemy types at various levels, so sometimes you'll get through an encounter and it'll be bizarrely easy, and then the game will arbitrarily have the same enemy kick your ass in a different area. I get that this is a fairly common issue in RPGs, particularly modern ones, but in a game that's primarily an action game, it ends up feeling really out of place and in direct competition with the skill focused mechanics.
Even the basic camera ends up feeling poorly thought out. It actively hinders combat even with the silly threat ring telling you where offscreen attacks are coming from. This could've been alleviated with good directional sound design, but the game has shockingly poor audio that makes it impossible to tell where attacks are coming from, or even if they're coming at all. Yes, you can get used to the camera, but that doesn't suddenly mean it's good or something that contributes to the game at all rather than constantly detracting from it. Plenty more could be said about the pointless RPG mechanics that don't ever allow you to meaningfully change your playstyle, inconsistent hit reactions on enemies that make it impossible to use combos or anything fancy, or how bizarrely similar the weapons end up feeling, but I think those issues largely speak for themselves. Any one of these problems could probably be chalked up as nitpicking, but there are so many nitpicks that God of War ended up feeling really half-baked to me.
To comment quickly on non-combat stuff, the gameworld was okay, but there are zero real movement mechanics. There's no functional distinction between walking, climbing, or rowing somewhere in a boat, which makes the side quests and any degree of backtracking painfully tedious. The game is marred by literal hours of holding the left analog stick forward and occasionally tapping circle to keep moving. The puzzles are clever at first, asking the player to use existing mechanics rather than utilizing minigames or totally separate controls from normal gameplay to manipulate the environment. But then it becomes clear fairly quickly that there's almost zero variety in the puzzles and, outside of the great traps in the vault towards the end of the game, nothing is added beyond what you see in the first few hours.
I'm a firm believer in the notion that the best games are the ones that become more than the sum of their parts by bringing everything together. Story that compliments gameplay and vice versa, and gameplay systems that compliment each other and offer variety while also all feeling like they're part of the same core experience. With that in mind, I'd probably give God of War a 6/10. The gameplay isn't abysmal and, being that I'm a huge storyfag, I found the general journey to be relatively pleasant and interesting. But man, it ends up feeling like a rough first draft of a game made by a tiny indie team that doesn't know what they're doing. Nothing comes together in a satisfying way, with the story and walking segments murdering the pacing of an action game that then gets in its own way with a superfluous gear system and inconsistent mechanics.
