The God of War game is what inspired me to buy a PS4 late in the game a number of years ago. I was happy to be on the sidelines and just pirate a PC game here and there at that point in my life but I had such fond memories of the original GoW games on PS1 and beyond that this one game got me to shell out what I think was $400 that fine day.
When Gow: Ragnarok appeared on the "free" section of the PS-Plus menu, I was pretty excited to get involved because I had really enjoyed the first one on PS4. I am now playing on a PS5 because I upgraded like a year ago, I don't remember.
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I kind of knew that there was going to be a long cinematic intro to this game and that is exactly what I got. No matter what the game is, I find this sort of gaming treatment to be rather annoying but since it is GoW I decided to endure it. I'll admit though, in the first hour of "play" you are probably only controlling about 20 minutes of it, the rest is stuff you are forced to watch and while you can still move around it is designed to force you to watch it.
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This isn't trying to suggest that it is poorly written, it is extremely well-done but I am the kind of person that if you take control away from me too often, I lose interest and this is why I don't enjoy a great many "story" games no matter how well they are done.
Unless I am missing something really obvious, which is always a possibility with me, I couldn't figure out how to skip any of the cutscenes either, which is really annoying. I'm not saying such an option doesn't exist, but I couldn't easily find it. Perhaps it is better that I didn't because even though it took a bunch of patience, I kind of understand what is going on in the world Kratos finds himself in with his growing-up son.
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Another thing I didn't particularly care for is that you are basically thrown to the wolves immediately. I have only been playing the game for 2 hours or so, but I have already been in 3 rather difficult boss fights. I definitely wasn't expecting to die multiple times in the first couple of hours but since there isn't any real penalty for dying, perhaps they are simply trying to force you to get better with some key controls such as parrying, which I hate but realize it is part of basically every single game these days.
I am only now, after 2 hours, starting to get into a sort of open world sort of environment because up to this point everything has been extremely linear. I am quite hopeful that this changes soon because if you want a game to be linear go ahead and to that. The original GoW games were exclusively linear and nobody had a problem with that. Be linear or be open-world, one of the two.
If it opens up completely soon, I will eat my words for sure and anyone that reads my stuff knows that I am extremely fussy when it comes to gaming: I like what I like and it is very difficult to convince me to stray from that.
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I did enjoy that one of the first tough enemies that you face is named Bjorn because the only Scandinavian real life friend that I have is named Bjorn and he is kind of annoying to me.
I can tell that this game is going to be very involved and I will admit that most of the menus confuse the shit out of me and I can only hope that I am smart enough to carry on playing it long enough to figure it all out. I can already see that this is likely going to be a game that you cannot walk away from for weeks at a time and then simply walk back in and start playing again so I am going to predict the future here and suggest that I am very unlikely to complete this game.
At the moment I am playing it on "normal" difficulty and I think that for casual gamers like myself, this is a good place to be. I am dying regularly, but just enough that I bother to change strategy. Just to check I briefly changed over to "easy" and it was ridiculously easy... do yourself a favor and don't do that.
Thus far, I am not "wowed" by this game, but because of the IP, I am going to stick with it.
I'm still in a lull at the moment though because I just played 2 games in a row that I really enjoyed so I'm quite quick to dismiss anything that I play after something like that.
If you have played this game and have some insight or encouragement to give me to keep going, I would like to hear about it.