I finished this afternoon. 7.5/10. Solid game, I see why it’s praised, but I was disappointed.
Spoilers follow—a couple little plot things (can’t discuss this game without at least mentioning the father-son relationship at the core) but mostly broader stuff that might still be a little spoily, like what I thought of the boss fights.
So let’s start there, since it’s probably the biggest disappointment. God of War just never feels as epic as past installments. Some of that is probably intentional for the story they wanted to tell, and I have my suspicions that a lot of it was a technical limitation, but whatever the reason, the sense of awe was diminished and nowhere is that more obvious than the boss fights.
I really like Balder, all your encounters with him, and it kinda makes his character and the fights even cooler that he’s just this nasty, scrappy human-looking guy. But beyond him I was expecting more variety, scale, and creativity and it never delivered. Most chapters just end with another palette-swapped troll, there are a few more fights against very underwhelming human-scale gods, and one pretty cool dragon, but that’s about it.
Everything feels very closed in, and if you’ve been playing games for long it’s quickly obvious how much of the level and environmental design is built around performance requirements. There are repetitive tricks to break up line of sight and shunt you into narrow corridors to facilitate “seamless” loading of the next area or to break a large area of geography into smaller pieces that are less taxing to fill with enemies. There’s plenty of backtracking around a central hub, but this is by no stretch an open-world game. I wonder if they had a hard time designing bosses and epic set pieces based on these choices they made for the engine and environment.
I’ve gone on longer than I planned already and didn’t touch on some stuff I was going to, but it’s getting late, so maybe I’ll follow this up tomorrow, or maybe that’s enough griping from me to get it out of my system.
I mostly had the hang of the combat, but to the extent that I could master it, that never became the reason to keep playing. The only thing I didn’t like was I felt like the dodge roll wasn’t as effective as it should be (seemed too common with the tight camera that what should be your escape move put you into a position that you still got hit—either by what you were trying to dodge, or something you didn’t see), I don’t have any complaints about the rest of it, but it was never some kind of transcendent experience that was fun to play just for the sake of playing.
Likewise the equipment and upgrade systems—they’re fine, nothing wrong with them, but I also wasn’t hooked into any kind of loot hunting.
Much was made of the “single-take” style of the game, the mostly continuous camera perspective from start to finish, which was fine. But it very rarely did anything interesting with that technical accomplishment. Here’s one very specific spoiler for the end: I expected Kratos to die in what was basically the epilogue on Jotunheim and for Atreus’s story to continue, and I thought that was going to be the perfect culmination of this single POV we’ve had for the entire story—I anticipated a cleverly subtle transition, the camera starting to follow Atreus instead of Kratos while they were still in a scene together, building to the impact of the realization that Krato’s journey is ending as he, I dunno, sits down and doesn’t get back up or something, and the camera keeps moving with Atreus. I thought we’d get something artsy and clever like that (in a good way), but nah.
Oh, and one more little annoyance: the hub-style world design and equipment/ability-gated progress wasn’t quite at Metroidvania levels, and that’s fine, but I did come to resent the nakedly “gamey” aspects of it. I’ve got a thing that lets me get past something I couldn’t before? Cool, just let me open the damn door then, or unlock the stupid orbs, or whatever. Every interaction didn’t need to be some little trivial little puzzle or trick. The sealed chambers for example: too slight to refer to opening them as a puzzle, but still, what does it serve that I’ve got to wiggle the analog stick around for a few seconds to find the weak spot and press a button? Just do that for me Kratos, I don’t need busy work, even if it’s just a second. And for something a little more involved like opening up areas locked by the Winds of Hel? It doesn’t really feel like meaningful progress to go from a short hunt for sticky sap I can detonate to clear a doorway to looking around for green orbs I can run between to transfer the energy to open a door. It was just slightly annoying light-puzzling throughout the entire game that would occasionally change forms into a slightly different, no more difficult, no less annoying element.
As I said, the game was a clear technical compromise. To achieve what they did with the detail and up close beauty, they clearly had to make sacrifices in the world structure and gameplay.
But wow, it was beautiful. It’s not really fair to the game that it takes me so many more words to explain my complaints than to say the game was gorgeous, because yeah, someone let Telefrog know, we’ve got another visual stunner on our hands.
Also, Atreus worked surprisingly well in gameplay! He was never an annoyance, he was never stuck, or unresponsive, or doing the wrong thing. If I forgot to use him, he helped on his own, and when I remembered, his arrows were an excellent ranged attack that could turn the tides of some fights. I’m really impressed by the way he was implemented.
Story time in the boat was always fun too, excellent voice-work and writing for the whole cast, but especially Mimir and Atreus and Kratos together. The dwarves were always fun too. I did like spending time with all of them.
I finally started playing this. I’m a couple of hours in (just got to the blue axe upgrade guy), and much to my surprise not really feeling it. The story hooks they’ve set up are interesting enough, but everything about the gameplay feels just utterly bland.
The beginning of the game is pretty story heavy. Combat is very basic and they slowly roll stuff out. Have you taken your first, uh, trip? By the end of that part the combat really was starting to get really good. Hang in there!
Without too much in the way of spoilers, can anyone comment on about how much main content is left once the game gives a pretty clear warning about reaching a point of no return?
Thanks! I might just head into that tonight. I’d been out and about exploring, but that’s starting to wear a bit thin for me as I’m enjoying the story much more than the combat and puzzles so I think I’m ready to wrap this up.
Picked this up over the weekend since it was on sale and I’m loving it. Going through on the harder (but not hardest) difficulty and I’m getting worked! First few hours when you have limited crowd control and enemies kill you in 2 or 3 hits was tough. Now that I’ve got more tools and better gear it’s balancing out, but first time I went up against a valkyrie I got demolished.
Game does a really good job of layering the new systems on top of each other. All of the gear management can be a little bit much, but I appreciate that it allows you to tailor your equipment to your fighting style.
I dig the combat. Pacing is really good; I never feel like I’m mashing buttons to keep to with the screen, but it also feels fluid. When you get on a roll of axe throwing, summoning, slicing, and punching through a mob it feels really good. Not too many cheap deaths either.
As others have said, story and voice acting is great. I love the kratos/atreus relationship and my wife is really confused why I keep calling our dog “boy”. Looking forward to seeing where it goes from here (just getting to the mountain for the second time).
I’m so excited to finally start playing this! I’m on the difficulty one above normal and the first fight took me 4 tries to survive long enough to take out all of the waves. I think now that I’m used to the combat I may be OK, but it didn’t start off easy (to me).
I’m very early in but liking it so far. I like the tone and dialog, he’s a gruff bastard but he doesn’t seem bad - just not very good at giving some warmth to his son. He seems so focused on getting his son ready.
