The very angry Spartan Kratos is back for another round of bone-crunching, head-splitting mayhem in God of War: Ascension.

A prequel to 2005’s original, the new adventure begins with Kratos chained to a rock and tormented by Furies for breaking his blood oath to God of war Ares. Once he escapes, he resumes his bloodthirsty campaign against the capricious Greek deities.

Strangely, despite this being part of Kratos’ origin story, the introduction spends no time telling us anything about him. For newcomers to the franchise, this will mean playing much of the game’s opening with little idea as to why Kratos even matters.

There are a couple of short and emotional cut scenes where Kratos hallucinates about his family but the game is still about hacking everything to death in the most brutal way possible.

The first half of the game will be exceedingly familiar to anyone who’s played a God of War game before. Almost nothing has changed, except that the Blades of Olympus - twin knives with retractable chains attached to Kratos’ arms - now have various different elements you can try out, based on the four gods Poseidon, Hades, Zeus and Ares.

But the second half of the game is a lot more interesting and almost makes up for the hours of trudging around listlessly slashing at things.

We eventually learnt how Kratos came to be locked up and the bulk of the plot is told through flashbacks during Kratos’ prison escape. There is a complete tale here, but the flashforwards to the present day are more distracting than revealing.

Thankfully the multiplayer mode – the first ever in a God of War game – makes up for the disappointing single player campaign to a small extent.

Swapping Kratos for a nameless warrior who can be customised and earn extra abilities through experience points, you must choose allegiance with one of four Greek gods Aeus, Ares, Poseidon or Hades and with that choice you will be rewarded with specific skills and weapons which offer different fighting styles.

You can choose to go through a training stage or skip that and get in to the lobbies where you will be tasked to work together to protect flags like an ancient Greek version of laser quest (except with more carnage) or simply fight off hoardes of beasts until the clock runs down.

God of War fans should be happy with all the stabbing, slashing, beheading and disembowelling Ascension serves, but the tormented Kratos seems more exhausted than bloodthirsty, and it is time Sony gave him a rest.