https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvxxp3/god-of-war-2018-review

You can tell a lot about how confident a publisher is in a game by how it handles reviews. Much like movie studios that don't hold pre-release screenings for movies they think suck, sometimes when a game publisher thinks it has a stinker on its hands it holds review copies until release day so it's harder to warn people that a game is bad before they buy it. By the same logic, when a publisher is confident, they give reviewers a lot of time with a game prior to release.

Sony gave us review copies for the new God of War about two weeks prior to release. I can't even remember the last time we got review copies this early. And yeah, to just cut to the chase, Sony has every right to be confident: God of War is excellent, the kind of big budget exclusive that used to define consoles but that we don't see much of these days.