To defeat the Cyclops we had to beat it up for a bit, and when the opportunity was right, we used one of its knees as a stepladder, plunged Kratos' hands into the monster's eye socket and tore out its eye. The whole sequence is quite gruesome and therefore intensely satisfying, and the process is capped off with Kratos' being able to actually keep the eye as a souvenir of sorts, though acquiring such things does enable him to receive special bonus items.

We also like the straight forward but challenging puzzles, the most notable revolving around these series of discs floating in lava. Basically, Kratos needs to get on the other side, and to do this he's get on top of these discs and wind them around, and as he does this they move closer to where he's got to go, but as he's doing this an innumerable amount of enemies jump from the lava and attempt to bash his brains in, and if he lets go of a disc it begins to unwind and move back to its original position. It was the type of challenge that, while fairly simple in theory was rather difficult in practice.

Near the end of the demo, Kratos locates the fleece but it's on the other side of a lava bed. To get there, he basically takes this humongous stone structure supported by all these pillars and pushes it into the lava to form a bridge. It's just one of those truly breathtaking moments because here's this tiny little guy (the God of War, mind you, but still a shrimp) pushing and subsequently destroying this enormous Parthenon-inspired structure into hot, molten lava, and then he just runs across like it was nothing.

After nabbing the fleece, Kratos returns to the door with Medusa's head on it unharmed and walks right into an open area, the type of place that reeks of foreboding. We just knew that something really bad was going to happen and Sony delivered the goods. The demo concluded shortly after this fat and ugly gorgon (with bitch tits) smashed through a wall and went directly after Kratos. There was no opportunity to fight her, but we've made a note to whoop her ass in the future.

If the demo is anything to go by, then God of War II is going to be just as thrilling if not more incredible than the original. The developers appear to be sparing no expense in making it one of the most violent games on the PlayStation 2 and we couldn't be happier. Look for more in depth coverage leading up to the game's release.