God of War Ragnarok

I only recently played God of War a month ago. Yeah, it took me that long to get into the game and finish it. I’ve only used it as a benchmark for video cards, but when I was asked to review God of War Ragnarok, I powered through the game in a few days. And it was such a fun game, increasing my expectations for God of War Ragnarok. The game just hit PC and it’s a pretty damn good port like the previous game with that pesky PSN requirement that hindered a few days of my play through.

God of War Ragnarok picks up three years later after the previous game with Atreus a little grown up and winter still going on strong. The lake that you took the boat around in the first game has since frozen completely over. Many of the characters from the first game also return such as the two dwarves that help with your armor and weaponry, Mimir the smartest head alive, and Freya, ex-wife of Odin. As teased in the end of God of War, Thor makes his mighty debut and him along with Heimdall and Odin are the gods you have to be worried about in this game.

While you may have a bunch of different attacks after the end of the first game, you’re back to simple Kratos, but you’ll have your blades very early on in the game. The Leviathan Axe returns as well and both of these are your main damage dealers until you get a spear later in the game. The same goes for Atreus as his powerful bow at the end of the first game is now back to being a regular bow here with simple arrows. As with the previous game, you’ll be able to upgrade your weapons and armor as well as your shield this time around. You’ll have access to a few different shields as your Guardian shield that helped keep you alive in the first game gets broken for a bit.

I view God of War Ragnarok as a nice iteration from the previous game. It takes what works, enhances it a bit with new things, and delivers a fun and familiar experience. Having just played the previous game, I had no problems jumping into Ragnarok and becoming comfortable with how combat worked.

Story wise, I won’t get too much into it except there’s some fabulous moments and a great arc for Sindri and Brok, the two dwarves that have helped you out with your gear. There weren’t too many surprises, but like the previous game the acting was really good and you’ll definitely become engaged with the old and new characters alike with what happens.

You’ll get to visit all the realms this time around and I like how each of them are unique in their own way. There are some new monsters thrown in such as the wight and stag berserkers along with the old hel-walkers and draugrs to name a few. Each one is fun to fight against and some have their own weaknesses that you’ll have to exploit in order to take down.

While you mostly will take on the role of Kratos, God of War Ragnarok will also put you in the shoes of Atreus and his journey. Atreus plays a big role in the game and it was nice to get a few quests using his abilities. He plays completely different from Kratos where you can sit back and kite enemies with your bow, but he’s also a formidable hand to hand fighter as well.

God of War is known for both the fighting and the puzzles and here we have some of the same puzzles that were present in the previous game. Mostly the ones I remember are the gates and chains you have to interact with and use your axe to freeze them in place. A nice twist to the puzzles is using Sigil magic from Atreus’ arrows to chain frost or fire to an area that’s needed. The puzzles aren’t too annoying most of the time, but there were a few where you’ll have to think a bit. And of course, you’ll have to do some hunting for the spots that open the chests that increase Kratos’s health and rage meter.

Whereas God of War had the Valkyrie fights, in God of War Ragnarok, you get a sword hilt that you can put into gravestones to summon an ancient berserker or two that are varied and tough to fight. These are similar to the Valkyrie fights as they are optional and you’ll have to figure out the pattern to defeat them. You do get some good rewards like the Valkyrie fights and can be worth it to find and finish.

There are also plenty of side quests for you to take on, which in turn will net you some good gear to improve your character. With nine realms to explore, you’ll have plenty to do before and after you finish the game. There are some missions afterwards that continue or enhance the story a bit, so it is good to go and continue playing the game after you finish the main quest line.

Speaking of the main quest line, it took me about 24 hours to finish the game. That’s me going mostly through the main quest and doing a very small amount of side quests. And then there’s the Valhalla DLC that adds even more for Kratos to do. So with all that said, there’s a lot of content in the game than just the main quest.

Like our review of the PS5 version, God of War Ragnarok is a stellar game that delivers on graphics, gameplay, and story. I pretty much agree with our previous reviewer’s views, but how well does it play on the PC.

My setup is a pretty high end machine consisting of an AMD 7800X3D CPU paired with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. For my testing. I played on a 46” OLED 4K display with a 120Hz VRR panel. For settings I turned everything to Ultra except I disabled motion blur.

Performance as you can imagine was pretty stellar with upwards of 120FPS through most of the campaign. It might have dipped a little bit at times, but it was a pretty consistent experience throughout my 24 hours. I’ve read where people got some bad performance dips as they got later into the game, but I never noticed this myself. This is even with people with an RTX 4090. But having an FPS counter in the upper right while playing the game, it never seemed to waver in any of the areas dramatically.

Some great PC specific features added are AI upscaling, frame generation, and ultrawidescreen support. For AI upscaling, there’s NVIDIA’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR 3.1, and Intel’s XeSS. Since I’m on a NVIDIA card, I chose to do some testing in DLSS and it did some good uplift in both Quality and Balanced settings. Enable Frame Generation and get even more frames at the cost of latency. Like God of War, God of War Ragnarok also lets you turn on NVIDIA Reflex if you have a NVIDIA card to mitigate some of the latency. Even with lesser cards, you should get some good performance for God of War Ragnarok with these options available as the game was designed to look good and play well on a PlayStation 4 initially.

One great addition is support for ultrawidescreen monitors. I used to game on one and it’s such an immersive experience to have an enormous wide field of view. I tested this on my monitor by changing the aspect ratio to 32:9 and it really blew me away on how much more you could see. If you have an ultrawidescreen monitor, God of War Ragnarok’s native implementation will be a treat for your eyes.

The game never crashed once in my 24 hours of playing and I never had any issues whatsoever. As far as a PC port goes, this one of the better Sony ones and I was really happy with both the performance and stability of the game.

One issue I had the first day I was playing was that the game will not work without PSN. To illustrate this, I had it downloaded and was playing without being prompted to sign into PSN the first time. During my gameplay, my Internet connection went out for most of the day. I took a break and quit to Windows. When I came back and tried to load up the game, it would only let me quit without a connection to PSN. That meant for this single player game, I was unable to play at all without an Internet connection. I have no problems with PSN being required for multiplayer games and we have seen that you really don’t need it on the PC ala Helldivers 2, but to force PSN on a single player game like God of War Ragnarok seems unnecessary. Especially since there’s really no benefit that I can see with logging into PSN for this one. I hope that Sony reconsiders this on this and future single player games as it can really hinder the experience, especially with such a good game like God of War Ragnarok.

Overall, the port of God of War Ragnarok to the PC is extremely well done. The game plays really well and from what I’ve read, should play well on a wide range of hardware. The story is fantastic and the action is fast and furious. Even for a two year old game, the graphics are top notch and you can see the high quality in 4K if you have the machine to do so. It’s a great continuation of Kratos’ story and on PC, a solid port that delivers in many nice PC specific features that enhance the experience.