Kratos, the muscle-bound, tormented Spartan turned god of war, sets out in his smallest (platform-wise) adventure ever in God of War: Betrayal for the mobile. In an interview, Phil Cohen, producer and designer of God of War: Betrayal, talks about what it's like squeezing such a powerhouse franchise into such a small package.

Knowing the limited capabilities of a mobile phone, Phil Cohen and his team had a challenging, if somewhat fun, experience putting together a game that people will enjoy while keeping into the spirit of the original series. Even though scaling the game down from a 3D platform action game to a 2D side-scroller seemed to compromise the game's spectacular visuals when it first came out, the designers were still quite pleased with the results of its transition to a mobile platform.

When asked to describe what their biggest challenge was in making the project, Cohen had this to say:

The challenge wasn't so much in capturing the feel of the combat as it was in capturing the feel of God of War's visual look and gameplay design. You have very limited processing power and memory on most handsets, which makes devising puzzles, traps, environment interaction, and enemy behavior very difficult.

With such extreme hardware limitations, there is a fine balance between character art, frames of animation, environment, interactive objects and the cost of the game code for each. If you get too ambitious with a level's design, filling it with lots of traps, locked doors, animated torches, waterfalls, enemies, etc., you may find yourself faced with a decision to reduce some of the core combat or to revise the level. It was tough to scale back on some of the initial plans for the levels and find ways to keep them engaging over the entire game.