you can really tell this is one of the last games ubisoft made with some artistic intent, for better and for worse. it takes a lot of aspects from prince of persia and beyond good & evil and invents a bold new type of game: Sly Cooper for grownups. for a majority of the game the parkour carries it but the combat is pretty terrible throughout (no doubt from that PoP DNA) and the story loses sight of itself way too quickly. Ezio is cool but literally every other character gets introduced with their character trait and then forgotten about in the name of some conspiracy nobody cares about. however, that conspiracy let me jump around like a monkey, so i’d say it was worth it

pretty awesome expansion that bolsters a lot of the strengths and a lot of the weaknesses that Ragnarok had. its pretty fun to brutalize the enemies in this game especially since that little dickhead kid isnt around, but somehow even without the worst character around the writing still finds a way to flounder. GoW 2018 handled a "mature" story incredibly well but Ragnarok's big problem is that its idea of "maturity" is giving a bunch of verbose, namby-pamby speeches about how killing is bad. this game does nothing to address the impersonal, pathetic way the main game handles its characters but it does a lot to address the fact that the game is better when atreus isnt there so it gets full points. also, the fan service worked on me. also, getting to actually fight the God of War in this one was given just the right amount of grandiosity and grounding that it needed to. ultimately pretty cool expansion, looking forward to the next mainline title where kratos makes daisy chains with anubis or some shit