God of War Ragnarok is the sequel to the rebooted game from 2018. It’s a third person puzzle hack and slash. If you’ve played the 2018 game, then this game will be instantly familiar, and maybe overly so. The core gameplay loop remains the same. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the story starts a few years after the previous, where Atreus is now a teenager, although he remains quite annoying, especially in the earlier parts of the game where he’s rash and lacking the life experience of Kratos.
Still steeped in Norse mythology, Kratos and Atreus have been living in hiding, trying to avoid the consequences of their actions from the previous game. Ragnarok is coming, and they were okay to ride it out. However, they were forced into action. Kratos is the one that’s unwilling at first. He’s lost much of his bluster and rage from the original games, and displaying a lot more wisdom and reasonableness. Still, that only holds him back so far, and the story focuses on the father and son relationship, and how Kratos can sometimes struggle with connect with Atreus, and yet he really cares for him.
Gameplay wise, this is still a hack and slash. Kratos has two main weapons, his Leviathan Axe, and his Blades of Chaos. The axe is more suited for one-to-one combat, while the blades have a move set that makes clearing swarms of enemies easier. Light and heavy attacks are mapped to the right shoulder buttons. Complementing that is the ability to block using his shield. He can aim and throw either weapon at enemies. And through a combination of different button holds, Kratos can execute different moves. Completing his move set are Runic attacks that can be swapped in and out, depending on your preferences.
It’s a robust enough combat system, and it is a more personal system given that the camera is permanently closer to Kratos (no different than the 2018 game). This can also make it feel claustrophobic, as you’ll often get enemies flanking Kratos, where he’s facing the wrong way and needs to evade an incoming attack. Atreus is almost always there, and he can help during the battles by firing arrows or stunning the enemies. He’s mostly controlled by AI, but you have limited control such as having Atreus fire the arrows on command.
There is a light RPG system where Kratos and even Atreus gain experience. It isn’t used for leveling up in the most traditional sense but rather is used to unlock more moves. Use these new moves enough and they get enhancements, thereby encouraging the player to mix up combat (which you would also want to do to avoid combat getting too repetitive and stale). Furthermore, loot is a big part of the gameplay loop. Beating enemies will cause them to drop loot, but you’ll get most of them from exploration. There are always constant branches in the main path where there’ll be a chest hiding (and often, even in plain sight on the main path). To the point where the characters even make jokes about Kratos constantly diverging to find a crate. The loot is then used to upgrade his weapons, armor and other accessories.
Unfortunately, the game’s structure is already very similar to the 2018 game, and this game doesn’t evolve it much more. It instantly feels samey, and playing through the first ten hours, it ends up being predictable. This is because each chapter is structured almost the same in that you’ll explore, solve some puzzles, fight some enemies, get to the end with a bigger cutscene, and then make your way back fighting some more enemies. It’s tiring and feels like a lot of it is filler. Which can be said for the puzzles, most of the puzzles are simple, but can border on annoying. These puzzles can be boiled down to finding something for Kratos to throw his axe at to hit a switch, thereby breaking through an obstacle to progress. It’s not deep and while it is a good change of pace from the combat, it’s not… fun or satisfying.
And that brings us to the game’s biggest problem, there’s too much filler. The game’s story, measured in hours to finish, isn’t that long. It only takes 25 to 30 hours. However, it’s the feeling of the journey that makes it feel long. The original game could get away with something like this, given that was more about the personal journey between father and son. This game, on the other hand, is on a larger scale, and you can say that the story could be cut in half and you wouldn’t lose any of the impact. There are just too many slow scenes that are pointless. There are long treks of repetitive nature. The characters constantly get sidetracked. All too often, they need to go to a location but need something else first. So, they go there to get it, but then need another thing, taking a big loop only to not need to in the first place, and we get back to the original intent.
The story also takes way too long to get interesting; it literally takes 15 hours before we get to the first bit of truly interesting plot. The game starts off okay, with Odin and Thor visiting Kratos and Atreus, while they are still on the run from Freya hunting them down. It evolves to the pair needing to deal with Ragnarok, the prophecy that foretells Asgard’s (and thus Odin’s) downfall. But for most of the game, you don’t see much of them doing much about it, despite the urgency. It’s only until the last third of the game where it feels overly brief and rushed to wrap up the story. It feels as if the developers ran out of time to properly do it justice, yet they still managed to find time right before the titular Ragnarok to send Kratos on yet another pointless detour.
Once Kratos heads into the final fight, it’s over in little more than an hour. While the climax isn’t completely underwhelming, it felt like it tried to close things off too quickly. It doesn’t help that the game has an amazing ability to not really create a likeable character. Almost all of them are annoying and extremely flawed to the point of not even being good to hate. The finale doesn’t answer much either, or a lot of the teases earlier on are not touched upon. That’s the biggest disappointment of the game; it sets things up but then they’re either cast away or revealed to be pointless. It truly does feel like a waste of your time.
After the story, there are still a lot of side activities to do. Each area you’ve been to has huge sections where they are optional and not visited as part of the story. There are hours of content, but whether you want to do more of the same stuff is up to you. Despite the fantastic graphics, and the high production values, yet it still somehow loses the wow factor. The combat and RPG elements become overwhelming. There are multiple ways to upgrade equipment, and then the characters themselves. It’s easy to lose track of what you want to upgrade next. Combat has a lot of options, and by midway through the game, you can finally use it to your full advantage, which is rotating weapons and utilizing the special attacks. It makes combat a lot more varied and enjoyable, but due to the sheer number of options, can be easy to lose track of.
There’s still one more major piece of content after completing the story and that’s the free DLC, Valhalla. It acts as an epilogue to Kratos’ story, for both the Greek and the Norse saga. It is a rogue-like, but despite that, it is still very story heavy. You are supposed to play through “runs”, and completing a full run will give progress the story. Dying is expected (unless you’re playing on the easiest difficulty) and you get stronger after each run. Yes, you do lose the temporary bonuses you get from the run, but you can then buy permanent bonuses to get stronger each time. Naturally, this means that the DLC is heavily combat focused, which isn’t too bad and can become addictive. It takes around five to seven hours to complete, depending on the difficulty you play it at, and it is a very substantial piece of content, especially considering it was free.
Overall, God of War Ragnarok doesn’t come close to the highs of the 2018 game. It had all the essentials to be an even better game, with the graphics, the core battle system, and the story coming off such a great game. Instead, it felt like it was half a step forward, like it was an extension of the game, rather than a proper sequel. The combat felt iterative, and the story was told poorly. Being semi-open world means that the story pacing suffers, and it already suffers from being overly slow for 80% of the game. There’s too much filler in the game, and so it feels like it constantly loses focus, and thus nowhere near as epic as what you would expect from the series.
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