5/5 ★ – usagichann's review of God of War: Ragnarök.

I guess this is the first review that I'm doing that's exclusive to this "blog". Unlike books that are on goodreads, and steam games that I review on steam, playstation games can only be reviewed outside since there's no native ecosystem for me to review them on. GOW 2018 has been labelled Dad Of War so often that the jokes practically write themselves. GOW:R is basically Dad of teenager of War, or something like it. Its a direct sequel to GOW2018 so if you haven't played that already, I think GOW:R won't have quite the same appeal. The gameplay is 100% the same as GOW2018 except that everything has been supersized. More armor, more shields, more skills, more rages, more enemies, more environments. Did I say more enemies? throw in about 10x more bosses! and sub bosses! Puzzles? yes, expect 10x more puzzles as well! did I mention you also play as atreus now? so yes, double the amount of characters! Epic soundtrack? still here. Characters that you interact with? 10x more! love the dwarves from the first game? You're practically living with them now. And how bout the story? That's also been supersized. Honestly there's too much story in this game and they really should have spun out another sequel to this game instead of trying to mush everything into one sequel. There's a huge amount of content in the game, though all very doable in a rather pedestrian 30 to 40 hours for the platinum trophy. The story does suffer for it, as I mentinoed earlier. Things happens slowly in the beginning, then all of a sudden, everything happens all at once, it feels like. Then the game slows down again. There's quite a bit of this back and forth and it jars quite a bit. I felt like the story portions involving atreus did not feel like a GOW game at all (and indeed, it really isn't as atreus plays very differently from Kratos and really deserves his own game, not tacked on to the kratos arc), but it was probably necessary to have the story make sense to the player. The best parts of the game I felt was during the open exploration of the new side regions of the games where you can hunt dragons, track down ghosts to get their stories, and other little odd jobs. They provide a good dose of combat, story, and slightly open world exploration with a much lower impact of story. The side quests were all very well done and all had a good resolution, either rewarding you with more story exposition about the exploits of krato's deceased wife or with some cool loot. the games' versions of valkryes this time are the berzerkers and the combat with all of them was quite satisfying. None took me more than 5 or 6 times to beat and all the fights were quite fair, everytime you lose, its probably because of your execution. The final arc of the story was a little bit of a let down but it is important to the story arc of the characters, so I'll let artistic license win on this one. all in all, if you loved GOW2018, you have to check this out! highly recommended and incredibly entertaining, even if the story didn't quite beat as strongyl as the 2018 version due to all the diversions of the story.