God of War (2018) is a solid game wrapped up in an unbelievable amount of 8th generation nonsense. There's a relatively compelling emotional narrative here, alongside serviceable combat and some pretty good looking vistas. Unfortunately, it's just dragged down by so much needless filler and so many boring puzzles.
The central narrative is what compelled me to keep playing. Kratos and Atreus make for an interesting pair, and the father-son issues grow and change in interesting ways throughout the game's 20ish hours. It's never really all that shocking, but watching Kratos' icy exterior slowly defrost is fun regardless. The side characters are a mixed bag. Sindri and Brok are mostly annoying, Waititi-esque comedians that left me wishing they would shut up, but Mimir is a welcome addition that really helps break up the silence between Kratos and Atreus. Freya is a little all over the place but her presence is at least warranted and she serves a good purpose. Since netiher Thor nor Odin are actually in this game, Baldur is pretty much the main villain and he does not live up to that title.
Combat is frustrating. This game's difficulty balance is all over the place in the worst of ways. Regular enemies are complete fodder, but bosses have like 2.5x the amount of health they feel like should have and do exponentially more damage. The game's reliance on the over-the-shoulder camera for the cinematic views results in some of the clunkiest camerawork in combat I've seen recently. Compare this to Resident Evil 4, which I just played, and the difference is night and day. In RE4, the camera's perspective is baked into the game design, not the cinematic design. This means that enemy encounters are built in such a way that managing your blind spot while shooting is key part of how the game plays. In God of War, it feels like the opposite, and like the combat designers had to work around the issue instead of integrating it. As a result, you get some extremely irritating enemy placements in your blindspot, and the bright red indicator for an approaching enemy or projectile is lazy and ugly. Bosses, particularly the atrocious Dark Elf Lords, will routinely fall out of combos and runic attacks, and generally just get to do whatever they want, pushing you around and using invincible flying projectiles.
What I mentioned in the intro is the game's biggest failing. What I'm calling "8 generation bullshit" refers to the endless use of levers to raise gates, freezing gears to stop things moving or to move them, waiting on slow elevators, climbing up marked rock faces, and having to get stupid metroidvania upgrades to open places. Furthermore, it heavily features a completely useless gear and stats system, ala Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There's even COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS levels! The XP and money you get are pretty much required, as the game's open world is so narrow as to be essentially linear. If that's the case, why do I even have to craft armor and get weapon upgrades? It's not like there's any large portions of the game where you can miss tons of XP, so the need to "build" your Kratos is completely unnecessary. I reached 100% on the skill chart at like 80% of the way through the game with no side content completed, so why do I have to gather thousands of bits of XP anyway? Why does loot drop on the ground? These decisions are utterly baffling to me as they do nothing but get in the way of the emotional narrative being told. I've seen this game compared to Uncharted 4 several times as a not dissimilar emotional reboot / ending to earlier campier iterations. I feel like the comparison does not act in God of War's favor, as Uncharted 4 completely eschews the numerical, gamey nonsense in order to make its narrative as immersive as possible. Drake doesn't have to level up his weapons perks to fight, and the game is all the better for it.
In that same vein, the pacing is just too slow. I actually quite like how this game's main quest is actually just an errand of sorts, waylaid by the plot, but it just takes way too long to actually happen. Toss in the endless and extremely boring puzzle rooms where you have to do 1 thing with either the axe or chains in 3 different ways, interspersed with combat encounters, and it just adds up to too much. I think there are entire setpieces you could easily cut from this without missing anything. Even the setpieces I did like felt like they went on way too long, like the flying ship or Tyr's vault.
The good stuff: It's quite pretty, especially with the PS5 update option. The cinematic camera, while pretty dumb in combat, does give the game a nice flair that puts Kratos in the center of the action and grounds all the setpieces. The dragon boss is the peak of the game. It's inventive and silly and absurdly over the top, which is a welcome change from fighting recycled elemental trolls that all die the same way. Mimir's a very good addition to the crew. The stuff with Jormungandr is probably the only time it feels like it actually manages to achieve a sense of scale, and I quite like those segments. The leviathan axe itself is a fantastic weapon, and throwing it and having it come back pretty much never gets old - a great use of a kinetic ability that the player is rewarded for constantly using. The first trip to Thamur's corpse to find the shard of the hammer is probably my favorite in the game, and it's the only time where it felt to me like the level design was anything interesting. The final section of the game is pretty strong (even if the boss is recycled), and the final cutscene is nice.
I did end up playing through the whole thing and bought a copy of Ragnarok, so take my criticisms with a grain of salt. It's enjoyable popcorn material that feels uninventive in its use of the played-out systems that defined the PS4 era. If you can get past that, you'll enjoy it. I wavered a bit between a 3 and a 3.5 but the final hours had so much of the "go here, pull this lever, fight this combat encounter, now do it again on the other side" that I had to lower it. Looking forward to Ragnarok regardless.
The central narrative is what compelled me to keep playing. Kratos and Atreus make for an interesting pair, and the father-son issues grow and change in interesting ways throughout the game's 20ish hours. It's never really all that shocking, but watching Kratos' icy exterior slowly defrost is fun regardless. The side characters are a mixed bag. Sindri and Brok are mostly annoying, Waititi-esque comedians that left me wishing they would shut up, but Mimir is a welcome addition that really helps break up the silence between Kratos and Atreus. Freya is a little all over the place but her presence is at least warranted and she serves a good purpose. Since netiher Thor nor Odin are actually in this game, Baldur is pretty much the main villain and he does not live up to that title.
Combat is frustrating. This game's difficulty balance is all over the place in the worst of ways. Regular enemies are complete fodder, but bosses have like 2.5x the amount of health they feel like should have and do exponentially more damage. The game's reliance on the over-the-shoulder camera for the cinematic views results in some of the clunkiest camerawork in combat I've seen recently. Compare this to Resident Evil 4, which I just played, and the difference is night and day. In RE4, the camera's perspective is baked into the game design, not the cinematic design. This means that enemy encounters are built in such a way that managing your blind spot while shooting is key part of how the game plays. In God of War, it feels like the opposite, and like the combat designers had to work around the issue instead of integrating it. As a result, you get some extremely irritating enemy placements in your blindspot, and the bright red indicator for an approaching enemy or projectile is lazy and ugly. Bosses, particularly the atrocious Dark Elf Lords, will routinely fall out of combos and runic attacks, and generally just get to do whatever they want, pushing you around and using invincible flying projectiles.
What I mentioned in the intro is the game's biggest failing. What I'm calling "8 generation bullshit" refers to the endless use of levers to raise gates, freezing gears to stop things moving or to move them, waiting on slow elevators, climbing up marked rock faces, and having to get stupid metroidvania upgrades to open places. Furthermore, it heavily features a completely useless gear and stats system, ala Assassin's Creed Odyssey. There's even COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS levels! The XP and money you get are pretty much required, as the game's open world is so narrow as to be essentially linear. If that's the case, why do I even have to craft armor and get weapon upgrades? It's not like there's any large portions of the game where you can miss tons of XP, so the need to "build" your Kratos is completely unnecessary. I reached 100% on the skill chart at like 80% of the way through the game with no side content completed, so why do I have to gather thousands of bits of XP anyway? Why does loot drop on the ground? These decisions are utterly baffling to me as they do nothing but get in the way of the emotional narrative being told. I've seen this game compared to Uncharted 4 several times as a not dissimilar emotional reboot / ending to earlier campier iterations. I feel like the comparison does not act in God of War's favor, as Uncharted 4 completely eschews the numerical, gamey nonsense in order to make its narrative as immersive as possible. Drake doesn't have to level up his weapons perks to fight, and the game is all the better for it.
In that same vein, the pacing is just too slow. I actually quite like how this game's main quest is actually just an errand of sorts, waylaid by the plot, but it just takes way too long to actually happen. Toss in the endless and extremely boring puzzle rooms where you have to do 1 thing with either the axe or chains in 3 different ways, interspersed with combat encounters, and it just adds up to too much. I think there are entire setpieces you could easily cut from this without missing anything. Even the setpieces I did like felt like they went on way too long, like the flying ship or Tyr's vault.
The good stuff: It's quite pretty, especially with the PS5 update option. The cinematic camera, while pretty dumb in combat, does give the game a nice flair that puts Kratos in the center of the action and grounds all the setpieces. The dragon boss is the peak of the game. It's inventive and silly and absurdly over the top, which is a welcome change from fighting recycled elemental trolls that all die the same way. Mimir's a very good addition to the crew. The stuff with Jormungandr is probably the only time it feels like it actually manages to achieve a sense of scale, and I quite like those segments. The leviathan axe itself is a fantastic weapon, and throwing it and having it come back pretty much never gets old - a great use of a kinetic ability that the player is rewarded for constantly using. The first trip to Thamur's corpse to find the shard of the hammer is probably my favorite in the game, and it's the only time where it felt to me like the level design was anything interesting. The final section of the game is pretty strong (even if the boss is recycled), and the final cutscene is nice.
I did end up playing through the whole thing and bought a copy of Ragnarok, so take my criticisms with a grain of salt. It's enjoyable popcorn material that feels uninventive in its use of the played-out systems that defined the PS4 era. If you can get past that, you'll enjoy it. I wavered a bit between a 3 and a 3.5 but the final hours had so much of the "go here, pull this lever, fight this combat encounter, now do it again on the other side" that I had to lower it. Looking forward to Ragnarok regardless.