God of War Ragnarok is an immediate follow-up to the 2018 God of War game. If you haven’t played that game, I highly recommend you play it first because the events of Ragnarok are a direct continuation of the events from “God of War (2018)” so there is a LOT going on you’ll have no clue about if you play this one first. The story is amazing and even emotional, the action and gameplay fun and intuitive, the audio top notch and the graphics look amazing, even at the “low” preset.

For the purpose of this review it’s important to know what hardware I played the game on so you have some context when I discuss performance. I played across two different machines.

1 - Desktop
Minisforum UM-890 Pro (mini-PC)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS; 8 cores 16 threads at 5.2 GHz
GPU: Integrated Radeon 780m graphics
RAM: 64GB DDR5 @ 5,600 MT/s
OS: Debian GNU/Linux 12 (Bookworm), kernel 6.12
Storage: Western Digital Black SN850X 4TB NVME
Graphics settings used: 1920x1080, low preset, held between 30 and 60fps

2 - Steam Deck OLED
Graphics settings used: 1280x800, low preset, 30fps cap, held 30fps most of the time

Like I said, this is a direct continuation of the 2018 game. The story is every bit as nuanced, action packed and, at times, emotional as the first game. For those of us who have been playing God of War since the Playstation 2 days, it strikes just the right amount of nostalgia, particularly thru certain audio or musical cues, conversations between characters, etc., without feeling like it’s beating you over the head with it and trying to ride on the coat tails of the series’s past success. The game does an excellent job of telling its own story, expanding on the world of Norse mythology introduced in the 2018 game and giving you lots of bonus side content to further flesh out the game world and the interpersonal relationships of the characters. There are even some direct call-backs to the pre-2018 games.

The gameplay is basically identical to the 2018 game. You have your blades, your axe and, toward the latter half the game, a new weapon that unlocks not only new attacks and tactics, but new ways to traverse the world. You can learn new skills and abilities for each weapon, upgrade Kratos’s health and rage, upgrade and customize your armor and do just about everything you did in the first game. The game very much looks and feels like a direct continuation of the 2018 game, which is exactly what it is.

The game looks amazing, even at the “low” preset that I used. If you have the option to use HDR the lighting and color palette looks great. The motion capture for the facial animations was well done too. The characters' emotions and feelings are believable and the facial animations are less artificially exaggerated than I’ve seen in some other games. There are also a variety of accessibility or customization options to customize how you play, from color blindness compensation to reticles in the center of the screen to having the option to play the game in pure black and white.

If you’re curious, you can check out my screenshots of the game here:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/gerowen/screenshots/?appid=2322010&sort=newestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall

Like the first game the voice acting, musical score and sound in general is top notch. The audio quality is great and, if you dig into the accessibility options, there are even options for additional audio cues for in-game events to help you out. Like any great game the musical score plays a big part in setting the mood. The combination of great background music and the top notch facial capture and animation does a lot to convey feeling and gravitas.

On my mini-PC the game ran great with the settings I eventually settled on; 1080p “low” preset. It generally ran between 30 and 60 fps, usually on the higher end of that range. I could have probably gotten away with “medium”, and played on that preset for a while, but there are one or two areas that are particularly resource intensive that caused it to drop to 30fps and, occasionally drop into the high 20s, so I dropped to the “low” preset and left it there just so I could have a consistent experience that always stayed above 30fps.

On the Steam Deck the game generally ran fine, but I ran into an issue where the audio stuttered or cut out a “lot”, to the point that it was distracting. At first I thought it was shader caching or the game occasionally dipping below 30fps, but I didn’t encounter the issue at all on my Debian mini-PC even when experimenting with settings that caused the game to dip below 30fps. Plus, and the issue would still happen during normal exploration when the game was running absolutely fine, so I think it’s something specific to the Steam Deck hardware or software. I tried tinkering with all sorts of settings including changing what version of Proton the game used and was eventually able to mitigate it enough to play comfortably with the following changes:

- Using the in-game setting, cap the game at 30fps
- Using the Steam overlay manually max out the GPU clock on the Steam Deck
- Add the following launch argument on the Steam Deck for the game:
SteamDeck=1 %command%

One thing to keep in mind is that the game does support FSR, DLSS and XeSS upscaling and frame-gen. When enabling FSR frame-gen the game hit 50-60 fps even on the Steam Deck. So if you’re willing to tolerate the slightly increased input latency that comes with frame-gen, or the slightly imperfect visuals or occasional artifacts that come with AI upscaling, the game has a variety of options for those technologies that could improve performance on lower end hardware. I used neither, but they are there if that’s something you’re interested in trying out.

This was an amazing game and I plan on continuing to play it. There are some side quests I still have yet to finish and an extra “Valhalla” mode that expands on some of the post-campaign events thru combat trials. It looks great, sounds great, plays great and was even playable on the lowly Steam Deck with some adjustments to the settings. The story was engaging and down-right emotional at times and, possibly, sets the stage for future games, though in a way where I don’t feel like there were any huge loose ends left dangling to string you along. It kinda ties everything up with a nice little bow and while it does introduce some questions, it’s nothing that spoils the rest of the game or the ending that you get. If you’re a God of War fan, PLAY THIS GAME, just make sure you play the 2018 one first.

Story great, amazing even but they've taken the fun out of the combat - did you like the shield from 2018? yeah that's gone replaced by shields that do the one job of the 2018 shield basically nerfing you, you get the sheild back but its been super nerfed - berserker challenges feel rushed - oh lets just put you up against 3, each of them spamming you with an attack that will one shot you, they also actively cheat you to make you have longer play time in game - skill issue bruh - the Atreus parts mehhhhhhhh - there's a point that it'll suggest to you to go to other realms to finish off stuff but only to find out you're severely underlevelled - why suggest that i do this? why push so harrrrrd on a second play through to complete everything - you constantly have to back track through places you've been to get to a challenge that you're again under levelled for? - long ting - the musliphiem (how ever you spell it the fire one) challenges are bad like the out of bounds challenge?! the laziest ♥♥♥♥ ive seen in a god of war game fr duh fuq - its just frustrating rather than rewarding in completing any of the challenges. - enemies will continue to attack you even though you're wailing into them - mini bosses will teleport out of harms way if you do too much damage in one single go or refuse to take damage until they've done their animation - the day/night cycles you have to switch bloody hell what a waste of time honestly just dragging the game out 30 hours of story and 8 hours of mind numbing "puzzles" - in the end i just didnt bother since the devs couldnt bother making decent content around a great story - game is is on rails any deviation or exploring is a big no how dare you want to explore stuff before we want to, how dare you want to complete tasks before going on a main mission. you're supposed to be the god of war not the mediocre bloke of some conflict