Really wanted this game to be better than it was. Until Dawn is not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but none of its sequels have come even close to the same overall quality and personal enjoyment for me. First half of the game spends way too long with its really uninteresting setup for the romances and friendships. Also, almost every character in this game is obnoxious in their own terrible way, and unlike until dawn, I still hated half of them by the time credits rolled. Story quality and gameplay eventually picks up in chapter 7, but for the most part it was a slog to get there. Post chapter 7 the game gets significantly better and more fun and interesting, but even then they somehow didn't spend enough time with a second half of the cast that apparently just... don't matter? The QTEs are not as engaging, especially the "hold breath" QTE. Lastly the ending... man what a letdown. No satisfying ending for all of the "choices" you made within dialogue during the excruciatingly long intro, just a shitty "where are they now" montage. The whole experience kills me because it could have been so good, it just fell short in so many ways that it snowballed into such a mediocre experience. I want to like this game so much more than I did, and compared to the Dark Pictures Anthology, it is an improvement. I guess I will continue waiting for my next Until Dawn

A significant improvement from an already great formula established in the last God of War. Almost all complaints I had from the last (lack of boss variety, locked access to a fair bit of the realms) were addressed in this sequel. My only issue I have with this game is one of the pieces of side content.
Some of the berserker fights were too unforgiving for this game. Most of the berserker fights were well balanced and fun, but there were two or three that were just frustrating. When any berserker spawned in additional ranged enemies during the fight the balance of the game tipped from "hard but balanced" to "too hard and broken". Kratos' move set is fun and flashy, but in these fights success often comes from memorizing attack patterns because the length of your attack animations are too long to be used without knowledge of what comes next. What I mean is if you make a wrong attack you are punished extremely hard for it because you cannot move out of that long attack animation you started until it has run its course. You can of course mitigate this by disabling certain combos and by memorizing attack patterns, but unlike games like Elden Ring or Nioh, dying and retrying does not feel like a natural learning curve of the game and can be extremely frustrating.
Despite my complaint of one piece of side content this game has to offer, it is easily one of the best games released this year. If you enjoyed the last one, you'll love this one.