Early review code for God of War Ragnarok was provided by PlayStation.
Also, this review is spoiler free, but I do discuss some of the themes of the story, without
getting into plot specifics beyond, say, the first hour or so of this massive, massive
game – a game that, I should also point out, immediately assumes you rolled credits
on its 2018 predecessor – you know, bear that in mind before jumping into the sequel.
And with that out of the way, on with the review!
Look, outside of a video I made talking about Atreus representing probably the best, most
convincingly written young character in a video game, I’ve made no big secret about
the fact that 2018’s God of War as a whole didn’t do a lot for me.
Before you jump down to the comments, this is just me, I know other people loved it – but
its combat didn’t gel with me, it felt rigid; its exploration overly linear and restrictive.
But biggest of all was that, while Atreus was written well, the larger plot driving
him and his dad; the pace at which their relationship developed was often languid—spending hours
wondering if this was finally going to be the point at which Kratos gave his son…
one comforting pat on the shoulder.
Kratos obviously had no idea how to be a dad, but to spend so long with these characters
only for them to make the slightest of progress as a team, for an angered “BOY” to turn
to a worried “BOY” made the Sony Trademark Cinematic Prestige it was all wrapped up in
appear a little off—like some of these moments were not quite the gargantuan, emotional developments
in the father-son relationship the game seemed to treat them as.
You may think of them as right or wrong, but my personal biases were not particularly favourable
towards this new Sad Dad version of Kratos.
Cut to four years later though, and suddenly…
I’ve spent thirty hours with its sequel, the upcoming God of War Ragnarok and…
I’ve enjoyed myself a whole lot?
I’ve felt so much more willing to go along for the game’s ride; more appreciative of
its scale, its beautiful sights; I’ve been downright excited to get in about the game’s
numerous combat scenarios dotted along its lengthy strolls; and most importantly, I’ve
been invested in its characters, cherishing the way all these complicated relationships
seem to have bloomed and developed over time.
Further, while the game still has its imperfections (that may or may not just be a me thing, your
mileage may vary)… those imperfections seem to fit, in an odd way, within the larger themes
of Ragnarok’s story.
How is all of this possible?
How did a series that previously did so little for me, end up winning me over like it has?
Well, I think the first answer is pretty obvious.
While it’s maybe a shame that a lot of this game’s details will likely go completely
over your head if you haven’t played the first game (with the recap in the menu failing
to completely capture just how much is pretty instantly at play here), weirdly (and I guess
ironically given the title of the game) Ragnarok feels like a much more compelling starting
point for these characters.
That is to say, it seems as if Kratos and Atreus spent the entire first game getting
their relationship to the point where it wasn’t defined purely by dysfunction—we’ve gotten
Kratos beyond the stage of some weird alien who seems like he just learned what a son
is and, three years later, we have a far more overtly loving father-son relationship for
it, rendering what dynsfunction still exists as far more subtle, nuanced and complicated—where
digging into those subtleties tells us so much more about the individuals comprising
this relationship.
Ragnarok is a game still very deeply rooted in family and fatherhood—it’s just a different
point of fatherhood.
Kratos spent the first game coming to terms with the fact he was a dad—now he’s trying
his best to be a good one.
A difficult task, perhaps, given that the Atreus we see here is not the little boy we
found in the first game.
He’s more accomplished, capable, but moreover, he’s an adolescent, with all the hormonal
chaos that comes with such drastic physiological upheaval.
He still possesses a great deal of respect for his dad, but he’s simultaneously flailing
desperately to get out from under his shadow; to be taken seriously as his own person.
And Kratos, on the other hand, is doing his best to reciprocate his son’s respect—trying
to find the balance between compassion, trust, and discipline; respecting his son’s abilities,
his agency while also trying to keep him out of danger; teaching his son the ways of the
world while continuing to reconcile with his own mistakes—the fact that he himself still
has so much to learn.
He can still be cagey, but different from the last game, he can also be open, vulnerable
and loving.
But most importantly, Kratos truly believes in something now—his love for Atreus prompted
his insistence that people can be better, with the constant peril the pair endure from
the very start here, being a direct consequence of that belief that the two just have to live
with, survive.
That pain is something Kratos is willing to endure, if it means that his son gets to be
his own person.
On the surface, Atreus is doing what all teenagers do – his clear respect for his father sometimes
giving way to a “get out of my room, daaad.
No one gets me” kind of mentality.
He wants to be treated like a grown up even though Kratos knows he’s not totally ready
for that; struggling with the idea that Atreus, like all adolescent kids, has to learn that
himself to a certain extent.
And it’s consistently, legitimately funny that, in a realm of such unparalleled beauty,
danger and fantastical creatures, it’s this normality that scares Kratos the most; it
just happens to be coupled with the fact that the stakes here are so much higher given,
well, the title of the game; where “making his own mistakes” so to speak—Atreus being
a teenager here, in this mythological setting—potentially has life-threatening, world-altering consequences.
Further though, and this is important, when it comes to the Norse gods acting as the foil
to Kratos’ father of the year ambitions, the team at Sony Santa Monica had much fun
bringing these all-powerful beings to life; beings that are portrayed more like a mafia
than a typical family.
And let me emphasise—this is, like, hour-one stuff!
While the game does settle into a groove after a rather explosive intro, meaning that yes,
a good chunk of your gameplay still amounts to walking in a straight line listening to
people talk—an element of this franchise that different people are going to have different
feelings on, I’m personally iffy on it as a method of delivering story to players—every
single interaction, every moment you experience between these two, all of it is informed by
this wealth of nuance, this complexity born of love rather than cold bitterness.
And don’t get me wrong, it also helps a lot of these walk and talk sections, like
everything else in the game, are just jaw-droppingly beautiful; with some of these environments
and the skyboxes draped over them really highlighting just how epic, how otherworldly the journey
you’re undertaking actually is – I mean there’s really something that gets me giddy
about being able to look back at what is now a speck in the distance, representing the
starting point of the journey.
In every way, scale of this game really can’t be overstated—this is the most Prestige
Sony Game of all the Prestige Sony Games, and it runs at a silky smooth frame rate with
the performance mode I played on.
I can’t even talk about msot of the stuff you’ll see because of spoilers but the detail
on show here, and the fact that there’s just so much of it, across so many of these
wildly varied and staggeringly vast environments makes me feel like I’ve only just scratched
the surface with the dozens of hours I’ve put into it.
But the technical side of things goes way beyond visuals, and of course, Ragnarok shines
in those other departments too.
I’ve said many times before and I’ll say it again—two years into the console cycle,
I think the DualSense is the PS5’s truly defining feature, and as someone who has been
championing the tech despite its inconsistent use (hell I made a whole video deep diving
different games that use it), there are few games that utilise the haptic feedback especially,
as fully as Ragnarok does.
It legitimately makes me enjoy the combat more than in the first game—where each swing
of the axe or pounding of the fist is leant an additional, bone crunching ferocity that
pulses through your hands.
It’s a story device; a means of conveying character—reflecting the sheer strength
with which Kratos crudely, brutally hacks through his foes—with the infamous recalling
of one’s axe now generating a hearty thud in your palms, not unlike you’ve just caught
your own mythical bladed weapon.
There is definitely a part of me that feels a little weird that this is a God of War review
and talk of combat is so far down my list of priorities, but don’t let that give you
the wrong idea—as I say, even putting the vibration to one side, the melee has finally
clicked with me.
It’s not without its issues—certain enemies straight up suck to fight here; almost always
because of Kratos’ insistence that while he seemingly has great situational awareness,
he seems pretty focused on what’s directly in front of him at any given time and nothing
more.
You sure you can’t just do a little swing to the side there, Kratos bud?
That said, there’s a really satisfying rhythm you can get into as you roll and dodge your
way around your foes, managing to group a bunch of these big dumb monsters together
in front of you and really letting em have it with the juggles, switching up your weapons
on the fly and seeing your enemies cower in a torrent of ice and fire; zipping around
the fairly open battlefields and parrying the seemingly unparryable.
It’s quintesessentially video game-y—it’s visceral, it’s hard-hitting, it’s faster
paced than it looks, it’s challenging (in that even a relatively small group can wipe
your health if you lose your rhythm)—it’s a damn good time.
But trust me on this, there is way more that I want to talk about in that regard… but
I can’t because of spoilers.
Let’s just say that one of the things that turned me off the original game was the wedge
that seemed to be placed between gameplay and story—it seemed like a narrative they
wanted to deliver, and they had to put in some combat to justify being able to sell
it as a video game.
For now I’ll say that Ragnarok feels like a far more complete package than the original
when it comes to pairing narrative and mechanics.
And with all that in mind, it seems like Ragnarok is a pretty unanimous hit, right?
If even I’m spouting this much positivity about it?
Well, it’s complicated.
While I’m just happy I enjoyed this game way more than I expected to, I do think it
retains some real, core structural issues carried over from the original that, to me,
bear talking about at least, in amongst the barrage of praise this game is obviously,
deservedly going to get as the reviews roll out.
For example, as much as the basic mechanics, the feel of combat is doing for me now, my
dislike, bordering on disdain for the RPG and stat game attached to it—how heavily
it’s foregrounded across the entirety of Ragnarok’s runtime—knows no bounds; for
me sitting at that most undesirable of intersections between overwhelming and dull; its half-baked
nature becoming apparent to me in the fact that, I never felt like I was building my
own version of Kratos with it, as much as I was just playing an arbitrary numbers game—having
to navigate all of these pretty unwieldy menus, with none of it having enough of a tangible
impact on the moment-to-moment action to feel worth the time investment.
I guess I just wish that the whole system—with all its stats for individual pieces of armour
and weapons for luck and cooldown and amulets and all this stuff with their own requirements
of materials and stats to use let alone upgrade…
I just wish it was all plainer than this, because this focus on numbers and stats actually
lessened the impact of new unlocks later down the line—where my thoughts wouldn’t turn
to the neat ways my combat and exploration options were expanding, but instead that lurching
realisation that I now had another upgrade tree to keep in mind, to allocate yet more
resources towards.
And lemme tell ya, this kind of thing was happening shockingly late into the already
lengthy story – a testament, perhaps, to just how full of stuff this game is, that
it can keep surprising you with new things for the vast majority of that time.
I just think that surprise, that mystery and awe might be better sustained, were the numbers
attached to it all not given such prominence throughout your playthrough.
It speaks to another issue as well – pacing.
For all the positive moves this instalment has made in terms of the franchise’s storytelling,
part of me gets the feeling that this focus on numbers—something that was very present
in the first game as well—is more to foster some artificial sense of progression, that
you’re developing into something… because otherwise, it bears repeating—you are doing
a lot of slow jogging behind others in this game.
Progress can still feel somewhat glacial at points.
Which is fine, God of War isn’t the only game to convey its narrative in this way and
a lot of people, clearly, are into that narrative style.
My problem here is the fact that, for as admirable as the commitment to the series’ one-unbroken-shot
aesthetic is, the cool moments it can occasionally lead to, this refusal of the game to cut away
for time at almost any point, means that you could have achieved a truly momentous objective,
worked hard to see things that you can feel truly proud of, real achievements, only for
that awe to dissipate somewhat as the game still requires you to trudge through it all
again on the journey back—I mean you’ve got to get back home, don’t you?
The game now having to fill that space with lore conversations as you mainly just hold
up on the analogue stick.
All of this to say that Ragnarok is a long video game by single player cinematic action
game standards – and within that massive runtime, I couldn’t help but identify some
fat here or there that could probably be cut, without even sacrificing the one-shot cinematography
(you know, there are a couple of moments where they get creative with the camera to achieve
such an effect), in order to do more justice to what would remain the truly epic tale being
spun here.
And all of this, in theory, should disappoint, when you perhaps wanted more out of certain
threads - a byproduct of the fact that the game is so eager to pull as much from this
mythology as it can stuff onto a disc, that it would be impossible to give everyone equal
time to every character, to resolve absolutely everything without turning the game into some
100 hour monster.
But here’s what you might call my Big Point with all of this—at the end of the day,
I think that’s just it.
If there’s anything that this game is truly about in its ruminations on the familial and
everything that comes along with that, it’s that family is often about as messy a thing
as you can get in this world.
“Family” here is a microcosm of the larger societal clashes happening around Kratos and
Atreus; the clashes that, in their case, at this scale, threaten to shatter the very nature
of this world.
As I can imagine a lot of people can relate to with their own families, every character
has their reasons for doing what they do, believing what they believe, and as such finding
a workable compromise can often seem impossible.
Atreus in particular believes, in his childlike innocence, that if he can just do this one
thing then everything else will fall into place and sort itself out.
But as with the game’s very prevelant examination of prophecy, of fate and what ability people
have to self-determine in the face of all of that, rarely does anything work out as
simply as our hero intends.
People get hurt along the way, whether expected or otherwise; people blame each other as well
as themselves, regardless of how justifiable or deserved that blame is – in short, people
mess up; they get things wrong, even when they’re trying to do right.
Every decision ripples out into a million other decisions, consequences, and new realities
for everyone involved.
And while it’s perhaps ironic then, that the game representing all of this is so linear,
so thoroughly directed in its systems and structure, what it manages to show off incredibly
well is that, in the face of the mind-bending complexity and absurdity that comes with just
navigating life, especially as a familial unit (and in Atreus’ case, one not necessarily
limited to the nuclear, but one that forms around him), understanding that the other
parties in your life are just trying to do the best they can, steering them as far from
danger and harm as you can, is all we can really do – the chaos that follows might
be daunting, but it’s ours.
Regardless of how the prophecies end, the adventures we have along the way, the things
we learn about each other and how we grow as a result of that communication, navigating
that human complexity, that nuance… those are the kinds of experiences that make family
worth holding onto with all you’ve got and, in my eyes, make Ragnarok worth playing, even
at its most subdued and relatively languid—every moment, no matter how slow, feels as if it’s
contributing to the unravelling, messy but unique tapestry of what it means to be a ture
family.
I guess you could say then, to answer that question I asked way back at the beginning
of the piece, that Ragnarok didn’t really do, change a whole lot to win me around here
- mechanically, structurally, it is very much more of that original game – seemingly with
a lot of the issues that come with that.
But crucially, by giving the game that more complex, nuanced and compelling grounding
in that evolved relationship between Kratos and Atreus, the ripple effect from that nexus
point—across combat, exploration and the wider plot—is more significant than you
might think.
As is the case with real life family, it allows you to see past all those little things you
wish you could change here or there; to set aside those quibbles, those things that one
person says or does that drive you absolutely nuts, and instead focus on the bigger picture
– relishing the fact that you get to spend so much time existing within something teeming
with such overwhelming love.
--- Thanks to Sony for the early review code and
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