God of War: Ragnarök

Not only the best game I've played in ages, with a near perfect marriage between gameplay and story, but also one of, if not the best, use of Nordic mythology across any media, I can remember.

Genuinely one of my favorite PS5 games. The graphics, presentation, audio, music, and voice acting are outstanding. The story is good, but I actually preferred the story in the 1st game to this one. The final act fell just a little bit short for me, and could have probably used another game to fully flesh it out. Combat is terrific as usual for this series.

Somehow even better than the previous game. God of war be praised.

The dynamic between Atreus and Kratos holds most of the emotional oomph, but the Atreus parts dragged. Ironwood obviously being the worst. Bow combat, blah. But the presentation is amazing, there's a great story about destiny, family and redemption, and the combat slaps. When it hits (which is often btw) this is a 95 and one of the finest games of the year, but I can't in good conscience give it that because there's padding/fluff. And yet I still fall on a 90 because it hit so hard.

This game is incredible. They took everything great about the last game and took it up a notch. It took a little while to get used to some of the changes, but in the end I think they were for the better, and I love all the new characters and locations we get to explore. As of writing this, both Norse games in the GOW series are in my top 3 games of all time, and Ragnarok is my GOTY 2022! Absolute masterpiece!

A better game than GOW 2018 in a lot of ways, except the overly sprawling story and ending feeling very unsatisfying compared to the focused story and conclusion of Kratos and Atreus's first journey. That's massively disappointing: such a narratively focused game flubbing the narrative, especially when it's the conclusion of the story.

Absolutely Perfect for me

Ok storyline. The game is way too long. The gameplay is really frustrating with puzzles that are really annoying & like most new gen games they keep talking throughout the whole game. Really long game as it's about 30 hours long. These games need to be a lot shorter for their story mode. 2-3 hours for this game is plenty. I don't need to stop at a lot of sections in this game, walk really slowly just to have a said character tell their side of their story.

Technically an impossible achievement and joy to play. However, you should definitely not expect anything beyond that. Kratos aside, it's a bunch of non-characters with whatever-agendas, some of who die idon'tgiveafuck-deaths. Oh yeah, and they all talk like witty marvel cunts and have completely out of place regular shit (teenie-gods lamenting parental alcoholism in a gow game, seriously!?!) going on. Don't get me started on the "ending"...

Incredible production value, with gorgeous graphics and solid voice acting and audio. I found myself enjoying the combat more than the previous game, perhaps due to more mechanical options. Some of the thematic threads woven throughout the narrative were genuinely interesting and provided discussion points with the missus who was watching. Otherwise, the story and its beats could be hit and miss, especially towards the ending that seemed a little unfleshed-out. The hits really do hit though.

Ragnarok is another gorgeous production that only first-party studios are capable of generating. The gameplay remains more or less the same, still room for improvement. The problem is that Santa Monica took no lessons from the reboot in terms of plot or story. The reboot got the later mostly right, this accomplishes neither. I don't care about most of the characters and the Atreus bits can be painfully long. My hope that this franchise would truly evolve is hanging by a thread.