God Of War Ragnarök is a late, but strong, contender for the best game of 2022
Ragnarök builds beautifully on everything that made 2018's God Of War such an unlikely success
Games Reviews God Of War
As its sequel arrives next week, on November 9th, we’re forced to reflect: The concept behind 2018's God Of War revival was, on the face of it, always a ludicrous one. What if Kratos, God Of War, the most platonically stunted adolescent in all of video gaming, grew up? What if a snarling, tattooed engine for over-the-top mythological violence, asinine sex minigames, and all-purpose teen rage grunts became an actual person?
Santa Monica Studio accomplished this seemingly impossible goal—and won itself a whole boatload of Game Of The Year awards in the process—by crafting a more modern and mature God Of War, examining the ways Kratos related, not to the latest minotaur or deity to fall beneath his blades, but to the people who dotted his journey. His late wife, Faye; his new enemies amongst the Norse pantheon of his transplanted home; and especially his son, Atreus, who accompanied him on nearly every step of that game’s far-reaching trip across the Nine Realms.
God Of War Ragnarök, Santa Monica’s sequel to that improbable resurrection, doubles down on, expands on, and improves upon that trend toward introspection—as it does almost every other aspect of the original game, which it takes as a template for an almost uniformly bigger and better adventure. Its greatest successes, though, come in the ways it tackles the questions raised by its predecessor, applying to them a seriousness that belies the fact that this is also one of the most enjoyable action-adventure romps in recent memory, serving up a steady stream of spectacle and action setpieces, even as it wrestles with the nature of love, family, and fate.
At the heart of it all, still, is Kratos himself, whose scarred skin now resembles less a tapestry of past victories than the broken reminders of a thousand unwelcome hurts. Haunted by revelations from the end of God Of War, Kratos finds himself torn between a desire to bond with his son, and his need to keep him safe from threats—the latter still being the most surefire way to trigger the character’s ever-legendary rage. Actor Christopher Judge—whose taking over of the role of Kratos for the 2018 game might be the single most effective decision in this franchise’s entire history—continues to mine every crag of the god’s stoic personality for depth, dignity, and even occasional warmth. He’s aided in this performance by the game’s stunning character animation, especially in those moments when Kratos drops the bluster, the glower, the power, and you realize that, underneath it all, you’re looking at a very sad old man, trying to do his best in a world he only occasionally understands.
At the same time, Ragnarök widens its focus, most especially as regards Atreus. The “Boy!” of yore is still played by Sonny Suljic, who was good as a pre-teen, playing the character’s more questioning and bratty sides, and is even better here as a young man trying to figure out his own place in the god-and-prophecy-heavy world of Ragnarök. The push and pull between Atreus’ wanderlust and Kratos’ desire for safety powers much of the game’s plot, especially once Norse god-in-chief Odin—heavily foreshadowed in the first game, and now played with affable malevolence by Richard Schiff—comes barging into the relative peace the duo forged together in the first game. But whereas God Of War kept itself locked to Kratos’ back, and Kratos’ story—as exemplified by the game’s still-impressive “single take” camera technique, a trick repeated by the sequel with a couple of neat embellishments—this installment is willing to travel much further afield, treating Atreus as much more than just an accessory to his father’s journey.
That widening scope also applies to the game’s combat mechanics, which dovetail with the story to periodically demonstrate that, just as with our grizzled anti-hero, there’s more going on here than might initially meet the eye. That’s especially obvious with Atreus, whose initially simplistic skill tree steadily expands throughout the game, cleverly revealing itself as the character himself hits new milestones of growth. His steadily expanding moveset represents both his burgeoning independence, and the increasingly vital role he plays in the game’s combat.
Which remains exhilarating, if occasionally frustrating, especially in some of its more punishing optional boss encounters. (All of that is adjustable, blessedly, both with explicit difficulty controls, as well as Sony’s continually impressive efforts with accessibility features.) Kratos starts the game with both the frost-based axe he inherited from Faye in the first game, as well as his traditional blazing Blades of Chaos, and finding the proper interplay between the two—managing the need for crowd control vs. focused damage, stuns vs. inflicting status ailments, and always, always keeping your awareness of threats preparing to clobber you from off-screen—remains key to managing the flow of fights. In a clever touch, Santa Monica has also added a tiered progression system to most of the individual attacks in Kratos’ moveset, with moves gaining both strength and optional modifications with repeated use. The end result incentivizes diverse play and ties neatly into the game’s reward structure, which is almost pathologically devoted to gifting the player some piece of shiny candy—upgrade materials, armor pieces, or a new conversation between your characters—for pretty much everything they do.
That deep need to keep the player motivated—and the attendant feeling of being trapped in gaming’s most beautiful and bloody Skinner box—occasionally dogged the first game, too, which sometimes felt like it had been focus-tested so heavily that a treasure chest or a puzzle seemed to pop up every single time the player’s eyes drifted from the screen for even a moment. Ragnarök sometimes struggles with its own impulses in this department, with the frequent progression-blocking puzzles it drops in Kratos’ path ranging from interesting, down to rote, all the way down to “Dear god, not another one of these stupid turning wheels.” Where it carves a better path for itself, though, is in those tidbits of conversation, which are more frequent now, at least in part because you’re often traveling with a more diverse array of people. (Can you tell we’re trying to avoid spoilers? We’re really trying to avoid spoilers, here.)
Besides being funny, and full of little mythological in-jokes, these mid-travel chats are where Ragnarök lays the track for all its big philosophical swings and character beats. Rather than the (relatively) simple road trip structure of the first game, the sequel is interested in digging in to what it actually means to be a “God Of War,” tying that question into Kratos’ ongoing hopes of becoming a better man, and a better father. By giving Atreus, and your other traveling companions, more chances to talk, Ragnarök plumbs their depths in a way that adds meaning to the big, epic moments of conflict that drive the story. (That deepening of character also helps address the first game’s iffy handling of its few female characters—it would be reductive to note that this game does, eventually, actually manage to pass the Bechdel test, but suffice it to say that Ragnarök is much more careful of portraying its women’s inner lives in general.) And by peppering in these moments of storytelling throughout the journey, it can make even a pretty milquetoast sidequest or detour feel significant.
Which is good, because there are a lot of side paths to explore here. Ragnarök is a huge game, with multiple large hub areas reminiscent of the Lake Of Nine from the first game—including a thoroughly frozen-over version of said Lake, because Fimbulwinter’s not just a fancy name, turns out. To its credit, the game does a decent job of signaling how important any particular bit of side content might be to the story, with lots of moments where characters explicitly lay out some bit of side content you might want to do through dialogue, a clever touch. All that being said, the game’s love of backtracking and repetition do wear at times: This is a game that loves to flash some weird little puzzle element at you, before literally telling you to come back later once you have the tool to solve it. The worst effect of this stuff is the way it sometimes disrupts the flow of the game’s story; characters lampshade what a weird, treasure-hunting packrat Kratos can be amidst the literal coming of the literal end of the world, but it still occasionally gives the sense that you’re playing as gaming’s angriest dilettante.
But these are all nitpicks, really, rather than genuine flaws. The fact is that God Of War Ragnarök is a brilliant, beautiful game, blending compelling play with impressive production values and emotionally intelligent storytelling, all in ways this medium often struggles to do. If you were put off by the first game’s associations with the franchise’s tawdry past, or its past embrace of twitch-gaming difficulty, now might be a good time to re-evaluate that position. God Of War 2018 already had plenty to recommend it—we can now add “prelude to one of the best games of 2022" to its list of accolades.
37 Comments
The sex mini games were not asinine. You shush.
I definitely saw some ASS-in-mine! …I’m sorry.
Looks good
I think it’s hilarious that AV Club is getting review copies and Kotaku isn’t. They’ve fallen so far.
I think it’s hilarious that Kotaku posted its review 4 minute before the AV Club did.
They’re too busy writing another dozen “articles” about pornstars and celebrity gossip
“GUYS GUYS: we’re writing about pornstars because we’re so open-minded and progressive and sex-positive, and not because our key demographic is that weird non-overlapping Venn diagram of sadlord male virgins and the cosplaying camgirls who drain them of their money and attention.”
Kotaku is too busy writing about… Disneyland to cover this game. They still haven’t really run any reviews of Bayonetta 3 either, but have promptly covered the dull-ass controversy about it. I really need a new game site to read.
I got sent to the greys after 12 years of being ‘approved’, because of an argument with John Walker. The site is dead to me. They lost all their good writers, just like Jalopnik. I’ve moved on to IGN and Polygon.
At least you got the courtesy of having an argument. I was sent to the cornfields because I dared to leave a comment criticizing their pivot to video content.
I made a second account that was approved, and it was sent to the greys for a comment I made that said “Great, another slideshow”. lmfao.
my condolences… I think I’ve seen a few people get into arguments with Walker where he doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. The quality of the writing has definitely suffered over there. Too much focus on video now, too.I’m not a huge fan of Polygon either. I stopped reading them because there were some *really* bad articles and a really vapid modern nerd mindset… which Patricia seems to have brought over to Kotaku with her (more articles about Disneyland and Marvel). I might go back to IGN because they seem to ‘work’ at least.
I haven’t noticed anything like that so far on Polygon, but I’m sure I will. My problem with IGN is the comments section. I doubt I’ll ever make an account and try to engage with anyone. It’s so toxic. I’m not perfect, I certainly argue about stupid things and have stupid opinions, but they take it to a whole new level.
Walker isn’t a very pleasant person. I enjoy a lot of his writing and he has a knack for dismantling what makes smaller games click, but the man is also a petty bitch. People who followed him at RPS will surely remember his strange vendetta against Hollow Knight, which stemmed entirely from a) the game not being Ori and b) people in the comments opposing the idea that Ori is some yardstick for Metroidvania. I remember his umbrage at the idea that you need to buy maps in Hollow Knight, despite that being a very deliberate part of the game’s pacing because it’s just as much influenced by Dark Souls as it is by ‘vanias. The criticism was basically “Ori gives you a map automatically so this game’s worse because it doesn’t”, even though they are both vastly different games even though they operate within the same vague genre.It felt like someone criticizing a platformer for giving you a double jump 3 hours in, when a different game from 3 years ago gave it from the start, even though both have completely different pace. Or, in a word: asinine.It concluded with Walker compiling a list of best Metroidvanias, deliberately omitting Hollow Knight from said list and putting in titles like Owlboy, a game that pointedly isn’t a Metroidvania even if you stretch the already nebulous definition of the genre to its limits.And that’s nothing on his even weirder hatred of Myst, which was a running joke at RPS. A bad one, because he generally just called the game shit and rarely dismantled the reasons for it being bad, even though there’s plenty of stuff to dissect there. I personally fucking hate Myst and Walker’s “I’m gonna repeat a joke only I laugh at” antics almost made me defend it.
i didn’t even know about this, but it sounds bizarre. Admittedly, I love Hollow Knight and find the hype on Ori to be a tiny bit overblown (I have a theory that it partially got where it did because it was the only game of its kind exclusive to the Xbox ecosystem. had it come out on PS or Switch at the time, it might not have felt so unique). It does feel like he has tendency to dig in on these positions and double down a little.
Think he just did the Myst thing again over at Kotaku, which was…odd.
God seeing IGN painted in a positive light hurts my soul. Its comment section is just a sewer.
i’m sure it is. I’m not enthusiastic about that choice.
Lol, if you saw my next comment that’s exactly what I said. I’ll never create an account and join the comment section.
I did and had to second this notion. I remember it being kinda bad far back as 2012, but its definitely gotten worse. They are like piranhas when anything remotely “political” comes up.
Geez, it’s been that bad for 10+ years?
I remember lots of slurs and mockery back when the Telltale Walking Dead season 1 came out and memory plus Wikipedia tells me the first episode was April 2012.
Could be worse. I got sent to the greys because I asked about Nathalie Lawhead.
I got sent to the greys last year after well over a decade of being approved on Kotaku as well. I don’t even remember which “writer” did it, but the article was trying to intertwine some socialism vs capitalism argument into commentary about a game and got some pretty basic historical facts wrong about both. I pointed out those discrepancies to them and got greyed. A bunch of long time Kotaku commentators have been sent to the greys in the last few years by the extraordinarily thin-skinned revolving crop of writers they brought in when it all started to fall apart. So the site is dead to me as well. Not just because of being sent to the greys, but because the site literally has no access to anything in the videogame world anymore. They don’t break videogame news, their access to review copies is limited, and their best writers are long gone. Hell, even right now, when they have actual game related things, like reviews of Bayonetta 3 and Ragnarök, they are buried on their homepage in favor of bizarre article bemoaning increased prices at Disney World. Fucking Disney World? The site is a cold corpse of what it used to be.
It’s a real shame, too, because the site was looking up not too long ago. Even after the big exodus, Ash Parrish was churning out content that switched between thoughtful perspectives and borderline shitpost material in the stylings of old Kotaku. Renata Price was filling the void left by Harper Jay with some intelligent, in-depth editorials… and then like half a year later she had to leave.I’ve always had my issues with Kotaku – the biggest was their continuous platforming of Cecilia D’Anastasio and the absolute ethical failure that was the Nathalie Lawhead situation – but that site produced two of my favorite pieces of video game criticism like, ever: Harper Jay’s review of Death Stranding and Tim Rogers’ review of Kingdom Hearts III. And that was what, barely 3-4 years ago? It’s staggering how much it went to shit under GMG and the new powers at be. Hernandez promised to bring what mattered and she ended up being just a friendly face for the goddamn neutering of that site.I think the point where I gave up entirely was when they skewered Horizon: Forbidden West’s story, only for folks in the comments to point out how many factual errors, mistakes, projection and misinterpretations they’ve done on the way. If they don’t care about their work enough to double check what they’re writing, why should I read it all?
Oh yeah, that Horizon story was ridiculous. Questioning why the Zenith’s came back to Earth, thinking that they sent the Gaia signal, not knowing how the Faro plague started, and more stuff, that is all entirely explained in the game (some things in the first game actually). Then having the gall to say some of the character motivations don’t make sense, when their motivations hinge on a plot that they obviously didn’t pay attention too.
Kotaku always represented the worst of gaming to me – where it’s a whole-arse, consumerist dweeb lifestyle, with very little in the way of meaningful game discourse.Can I have a deep dive into the mechanics of- no? What’re we getting instead? Oh, right, top 10 cosplays. The newest Funko-Pops you must buy. Some lukewarm twitter backwash pseudo-political hot-take (which pretty much just ends up being the status quo framed as bold, outsider opinion). I love games, but, ahem “geek culture”? Count me the fuck out. Whole place reeks of Lynx/Axe body spray and desperation.
They posted a review:https://kotaku.com/god-of-war-ragnarok-review-release-date-ps4-ps5-spear-1849734382But please don’t let that stop your hate boner.
To the greys telling me “tHeY PoStEd A rEvIeW”Great, they’ve said time and time again that they’re receiving less review codes in response to comments asking why AV Club is reviewing new games instead. My comment wasn’t strictly about God of War.*Edit*Ooo, they mad.
Ok, let’s say you’re not just shifting the goal posts because you were called out as factually incorrect. Your contention is what, Kotaku not getting review codes over AV Club is some mark of failure for the former. This is due to blacklisting from Kotaku’s reporting on labor conditions in the games industry. Would you prefer that they stifle this reporting to get review codes for games you already know if you’re going to play or not? I really don’t get the point you’re trying to make here.
Playing SIGNALIS. It’s really, really good. Like, REALLY good.It’s very much a throwback to the PSX era and aesthetic of survival horror. There’s less focus on combat and more on traversal and simple puzzle solving – some of it relies on reading notes and figuring out the sequence of events, others are almost old FMV-style puzzles. Combata and movement feels clunky, but in a very deliberate way – it’s not janky, it’s just slow and heavy to encourage a certain mindset.So far it’s very, very spooky, but it maintains that through methodical pace. There’s not much in way of jump scares, the enemies are just tricky enough to make you wonder whether you want to engage them without you drowning in corpses every other room They are leaning heavily into proto-Lovecraft – The King in Yellow is namedropped very directly – and there are interesting implications regarding the game’s linearity, as it’s implied that this isn’t the first time you’re going on this quest but it’s also not at all a timeloop and seemingly not a dying dream. Or at least what you’re playing isn’t. Maybe.It’s very, very good. My only two issues are: inventory management. You can only hold 6 items and that would be fine, if it didn’t require so much deliberate juggling of your plot critical items. It’s definitely a throwback to those old games, but it’s one of those things that feels just archaic. Theo ther is that it seems to play into a lot of the old school horror way of progression, meaning lots of invisible, nebulous tracking of your gameplay style and decision, in the fashion of Silent Hill 2 and Haunting Ground. It’s not a bad idea at all, but I already hear from other players that they don’t really know how to ensure a certain ending and I hope they’ll patch in some sort of NG+ tracker for that.At this point it seems that my top 3 is this, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Elden Ring. Excited to see whether GoW will just land in the comfortable 4th or 5th place or will actually crack that podium.
I have been putting some good time into the RE8 dlc and I quite like it. The story expansion is about 3 to 4 hours, but that’s still longer then say, Not a Hero and End of Zoe from RE7 which were closer to two hours a piece. Having a third person mode is nice, its not quite RE2 level quality but its not bad, the new animations are quite welcome. Mercenaries though, well well they certainly made this mode more fun. Lady Dimitrescu is obviously the most fun but everyone is quite enjoyable now and every character being unique is something even older Mercenaries mode didn’t quite do. Overall I love it.
“but suffice it to say that Ragnarök is much more careful of portraying its women’s inner lives in general.”No one cares. This doesn’t count as interesting anymore.
I wonder if Tyr shows up? I would genuinely love to see Kratos bump him to him, Hachiman, and let’s say, Horus (apparently like every single Egyptian deity is also the god of war?) just for them to sit down to dinner and a “okay, so how do you handle it” discussion.
Tyr was shown in one of the trailers, so I imagine he does unless it’s some magical fuckery.
I recently started playing the 2018 GoW for the first time. I had put it off—I got it as a PS+ free game some time ago—because, despite the raves, I was a bit wary of Kratos entering the ranks of the Sad Dad Protagonist Club. Sure, there was some haunted Kratos pathos in the originals series, but it was mostly there as justification for his murder tour through Greek mythology. So I was a bit wary of the 2018 entry.However, I have to say that I’ve been pretty impressed with the job they’ve done in giving Kratos more emotional depth. And they manage to do it with such an economy of dialogue and performance. From the jump, without anything in the way of backstory, you immediately feel like you understand the relationship and the history between Kratos and his son. You can see it in every taciturn, clipped response to his son’s inquiries, in the moments when he almost reaches out to comfort Atreus in an emotionally-fraught moment. Atreus, for his part, desperately wants to fall in line be the good little soldier for his dad, but you can see all the youthful exurberance, curiosity, and even a bit of unfocused anger beneath all that, just looking for an outlet. All of this should be treacley and emotionally manipulative, but they seem to avoid tugging the heart-strings too much.That said, there are occasionally some weird tonal shifts between those emotional moments and the actual substance of the game. There was a moment where Atreus lays into his dad for being Not There (both physically and emotionally)…and then, a few seconds after this blow-up, Atreus cheerfully chirps in with a vocal prompt for the next game objective.Combat is a bit much, to be honest. I’m avoiding dialing down the difficulty so far, but I just finished a quest in Alfheim and those dark elves were quite a problem—quick to overwhelm and chunky—so if they are the new normal for combat, I can see sliding the difficulty down at some point. My current combat strategy seems to boil down to keeping the enemies in front of me as much as possible (not easy because they love to flank), picking off any isolated enemies quickly, and avoiding getting hit as much as possible (there are scattered health pickups, but you can’t rely on them). If I can have some space, I’ll try something more complex (I definitely don’t use Atreus often enough), but it’s mostly just managing moment-to-moment.I do kinda wish that the game wasn’t so committed to the behind-the-shoulder perspective. The danger-peripheral warning arrows do help, but it would be nice to know exactly where they were in that space instead of inferring by position. I think I might like a health consumable over the wild health pickups found inside of pots or dropped by the occasional enemy as well; it’s a bit of a pain to sprint over to the other side of a fighting arena to pick up some health.Minor gripes, but gripes to be sure. Still, I’m invested enough to solder on.
When he almost puts his hand on his shoulder is a great scene. Also *Spoiler*When Atreus is sick.