God of War: Ragnarok

 PlayStation 4
User Score
6.7

Mixed or average reviews- based on 736 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 474 out of 736
  2. Mixed: 42 out of 736
  3. Negative: 220 out of 736
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  1. Zauzau
    Nov 17, 2022
    7
    Although an improvement in many ways from its predecessor, namely new enemies, lots of newly added boss fights and quests that make the game quite rich and worth exploring, I still have to say that this game was a big disappoint in terms of the Aesir, Vanir and Ragnarok plot.
    Both Thor and Odin felt super inconsequential despite their hype, we barelly got to see anything special from the    Although an improvement in many ways from its predecessor, namely new enemies, lots of newly added boss fights and quests that make the game quite rich and worth exploring, I still have to say that this game was a big disappoint in terms of the Aesir, Vanir and Ragnarok plot.
    Both Thor and Odin felt super inconsequential despite their hype, we barelly got to see anything special from the Aesir, Asgard as a realm was also super disappointing there is absolutely nothing new there and when Odin and Thor were defeated it felt weightless and unmoving.

    Fights like Jormungadr vs Thor we didn't even get to see anything, so incredibly underwhelming...

    All that aside this is still a good game to play, just don't get your hopes up from big names and popular cultural references such as a Ragnarok, this game lore wise leaves much to crave for and none of the main bosses are all that challenging even though they look pretty good animation wise.

    Due to how underwhelming this game was I'm never getting hyped for this series again, but sure I'll keep playing it.    … Expand
  2. slothjaw
    Feb 5, 2023
    5
    This seems like the result of taking an uninspired design and adding unlimited budget. You get something that is simultaneously so polished and yet so bland. I've never seen anything like it.

    The story is...great overall but boring the majority of the time. There's a compelling cut scene where the main character is questioning whether his responsibilities as a father will take him back    This seems like the result of taking an uninspired design and adding unlimited budget. You get something that is simultaneously so polished and yet so bland. I've never seen anything like it.

    The story is...great overall but boring the majority of the time. There's a compelling cut scene where the main character is questioning whether his responsibilities as a father will take him back to an identity he wished to leave behind, then 5 minutes later your sidekick is shouting at you that they found the magical macguffin of "Take Us To The Next Level." It felt like the needs of the story and the needs of the game were pushing and pulling on each other, fighting for dominance.

    The combat feels worse to control and less inspired in a post-Sekiro world. The game confidently ramps the difficulty up as if it has the tightness of a top tier action game and yet it doesn't. Baffling flaws persist from GoW 2018. You don't regenerate health between battles but dying heals you to full with generous checkpoints. This resulted in me dying in 1 hit at the beginning of most encounters and then starting with full health and winning on my next attempt only to rinse and repeat the next encounter. So basically I get a free loading screen at the beginning of every encounter. Yay!

    The combat feels sloppy four years later. Hitboxes and staggering feel inconsistent, and the intricacies of the rpg mechanics are both poorly explained and essential to your success at middle difficulties. The camera is too close to you and that makes it hard to get a read on the battles. You also have little control over the direction you attack with melee attacks being locked into where you're pointing with the right stick. This makes it difficult to address foes who surround you. It feels like you have more weapons than you need. They don't seem to occupy a unique niche and they're repetitive and unsatisfying to use. It's pretty much the same combat as 2018 with more breadth but few improvements to core design.

    The interface is awful(ly pretty). The map looks like a work of art and yet is largely unintuitive to read. The compass is a disaster. All your upgrade options are scattered willy nilly across separate tabs like someone sprayed a deck of cards across a table. And it all looks and feels immaculate like they paid a million dollars for every one of those bewildering screens.

    The gameplay mostly consists of "find the thingy" where you look around these stunning environments where you can't really interact with stuff. You do non-puzzles (aka "nuzzles") where the solution is immediately clear 95% of the time. The fights are repetitive slogs with the same bombastic moves with crazy eye popping animations. I couldn't wait til the next cutscene where I could stop dealing with the chores. It's all busy work in a massive and jaw-droppingly beautiful world of blandness.

    That's what's so weird about it. You can feel the money coming off the screen when you play. The acting, direction, sound, animation, it all feels like Benjamins wafting across your skin. But it feels so joyless and sometimes downright frustrating in its mediocrity. It's all the same problems with 2018 after 4 years and you know they had the money to do something about it. I guess I can't deny that a beautiful pig is still better than an ugly pig, but I was left wondering why they didn't use that money to address obvious issues from four years ago.    … Expand
  3. OldAndCynical
    Nov 11, 2022
    7
    Ragnarok is certainly impressive technical achievement on PS4, especially on Pro. It is also very polished, as befits a Naughty Dog product.
    Trouble is that as a mature gamer, I'm finding the game painfully childish at times. Even more so than Uncharted games. And, frankly, some of the slower narrative sequences, where you just follow path for hours while listening to story reveals, are    Ragnarok is certainly impressive technical achievement on PS4, especially on Pro. It is also very polished, as befits a Naughty Dog product.
    Trouble is that as a mature gamer, I'm finding the game painfully childish at times. Even more so than Uncharted games. And, frankly, some of the slower narrative sequences, where you just follow path for hours while listening to story reveals, are plain boring. Yes, I got bored in a Naughty Dog game, and not just once.
    On top of that there is way too much of the 'save the environment and free endangered species', and 'war is bad' -stuff in the game. Morality sermons, you know. Way too much. I mean let us have some fun now and then, please!
    And finally, the game borrows heavily from other sources; the prophet girl is way too similar to Luna Lovegood, and Atreus way too similar to Link in Twilight Princess (once you see the wolf stuff, you understand..). So it feels least original of ND games.
    So, while the game is polished and impressive to look at, even on last gen consoles, these irritating things do lower the score to 7 on my books. If it had been more adult and intelligent, and less preachy, it would have received 10.    … Expand
  4. Antares_87
    Nov 12, 2022
    7
    It's a good game but not a Master piece, I felt like a long DLC that the first part, I really not a fan of Atreus, the PS4 version it's amazing but the PS5 version sucks , don't buy PS5 version
  5. Pegasi
    Nov 17, 2022
    5
    This game is horrible, horrible! The beginning is actually great, but after 15 hours it becomes extremely repetitive and boring. But the BIG problem is, this is not God of War, this is just a Marvel movie. They transformed Kratos into a banana; the guy only cry and talk about how he became a hippie. The only good character in the whole game is Heimdall, he's really cool, even Thor became aThis game is horrible, horrible! The beginning is actually great, but after 15 hours it becomes extremely repetitive and boring. But the BIG problem is, this is not God of War, this is just a Marvel movie. They transformed Kratos into a banana; the guy only cry and talk about how he became a hippie. The only good character in the whole game is Heimdall, he's really cool, even Thor became a trash character. I recommend the older games, GOW and Kratos died with GOW3.… Expand
  6. gooodoofwwarr
    Nov 12, 2022
    7
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Really Bad Story, really bad Design Asgard, i wished cory barlog still be directing of god of war : ragnarök, not eric williams, game play is awesome bot story game and even design some characters like heimdall, is he child/: looks liks eric williams skipped all story, no answer the question for last game, and not even one right ending for us fan… Expand
  7. Luisguerreroa
    Nov 10, 2022
    6
    No me gusta la optimizacion de este juego, la versión de ps5 es superior, esperaba algo más
  8. Risax
    Nov 19, 2022
    7
    While I enjoyed God of War: Ragnarok, it isn't as good as the 2018 game. While the first game of the Norse saga had a relatable premise, even as our protagonists were travelling through different worlds and were dealing with Gods. Just a man trying to be a good dad after a lifetime of bloodshed, and delivering his wife's ashes to its final resting place.

    By comparison Ragnarok still has    While I enjoyed God of War: Ragnarok, it isn't as good as the 2018 game. While the first game of the Norse saga had a relatable premise, even as our protagonists were travelling through different worlds and were dealing with Gods. Just a man trying to be a good dad after a lifetime of bloodshed, and delivering his wife's ashes to its final resting place.

    By comparison Ragnarok still has the familiar aspect of Kratos, Mimir and Atreus trying to be a family and Kratos opening his heart, and they tend to be the better parts of the narrative, now there's also all this other stuff. The nature of war and if there is such a thing as a right side, struggling against prophecy, Atreus becoming a man and trying to be more independent. They are interesting ideas...but they're not given enough focus to be really interesting.

    The end result for the story is that, while there are some gut punches and twists that really got me, a lot of Ragnarok feels a bit like a slog while simultaneously feeling inconsistent in its writing. Sections where you play as Atreus especially sometimes feel like an entirely different game with how quippy the dialogue is.

    Gameplay-wise, things haven't changed a whole lot. The biggest addition is probably the sections where you play as Atreus as mentioned above and while he does have a fighting style unique to himself, I must admit that I usually couldn't wait to go back to Kratos.

    I also can't remember if your NPC helpers were quite this annoying back in God of War 2018, but shouting unhelpful advice in combat and immediately giving solutions to (admittedly easy) puzzles was quite frustrating. Maybe there was a way to turn that off somewhere in the accessibility options, but if so I couldn't find it.

    Furthermore playing the game on the PS4 PRO was fine, I had some moments were the audio wasn't synching with the character models' lip flaps as well as some moments were loading times were long. But it wasn't a disaster like it was with trying to play Cyberpunk 2077 on it.

    Overal, the game is good but not great. It honestly feels like we should've had another game were we focused on making allies, building armies and all that and have the actual focus of "Ragnarok" be on starting said event and assaulting Asgard. Like what happened with the original Greek games, though I guess those focused more on keeping the momentum and spectacle going while the Norse games are a bit slower.

    I'd give the game a 7 out of 10. Give the game a shot if it is on sale or something and you really liked the 2018 game.    … Expand
  9. Ryanm42
    Nov 24, 2022
    7
    Bigger is Not Always Better
    Let me start by saying this was a GREAT Game. God of War (2018) is one of my favorite games of all time. Ragnarok was a great game, but not the masterpiece that 2018 was.
    The story in this game was strange. It was overly long and drawn out in some sections, while being too slight and shallow in others. Characters and backstories were introduced and expanded,    Bigger is Not Always Better
    Let me start by saying this was a GREAT Game. God of War (2018) is one of my favorite games of all time. Ragnarok was a great game, but not the masterpiece that 2018 was.

    The story in this game was strange. It was overly long and drawn out in some sections, while being too slight and shallow in others. Characters and backstories were introduced and expanded, and then never re-visited. This game was not directed by Cory Barlog, and it seems to be missing his finer touch. I have finished the campaign and yes the game is longer than 2018, but since the storytelling was a bit uneven it also feels "shorter" or "lighter" than the first game.
    My biggest gripe about this game is how certain story elements from the first game are completely changed or ignored in the name of "setting your own destiny" in the second one. This is an interesting idea, but knowing that certain story parts of 2018 are ignored in Ragnarok makes the big reveals in 2018 lose their power. It deflates the story of the first game because the big moments don't actually carry into Ragnarok the way you thought they would. This feels lazy to me and gives the impression that the writers wrote themselves into a corner and could not get out of it. Again, I wonder how much Barlog's lack of direction played a role here. This game felt much less like a labor of love and more like a video game.

    The level design was also strange. Yes they were visually breathtaking. No argument here! Wonderful! However, they felt very linear. Very constructed. Each level is a series of separate rooms that require you to slide through cracks in the wall that mask loading times. This disrupts your traversal and makes it constantly feel like a video game. Again, missing Barlog's love of the series makes Ragnarok feel more like a video game and less like a wonderful story.
    I found myself getting turned around or lost several times throughout this campaign. This can of course be linked to my incompetence, but I never remember this happening during 2018. There were also puzzles to solve and chests to open that required tricks I never would have figured out if I hadn't gone to YouTube. I never had to do this in 2018. There is a line between "engaging to figure out" and "cannot be figured out" that 2018 walked so well. This game unfortunately misses that line at times.

    The level-up process was also very strange. The load-out menu has been completely changed. It is annoying and cumbersome. I often found myself accidentally closing out the menu when I was just trying to go back one section. Relics and runes are hard to understand because you can only use a few at a time rather than spread them out across your armor. The load-out menu also looks cramped and poorly designed. Armor does not show all its stats on one screen, you have to scroll and then it reorganizes the armor based on strength. It is very annoying and hard to understand. Minor, but certain words in the menu are abbreviated rather than spelled out. This takes you out of the game experience. And what if new played don't know what the abbreviations stand for?    … Expand
  10. metalthan
    Dec 4, 2022
    6
    This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. It's basically a 70$ DLC for 2018's God of War, BUT:

    It's lame this time. Action and graphics are good, but that's it. No more havoc wreaking and feeling badass.

    Kratos feels like a side character in his own game, dialogue is boring and waaaaaaaay too long, in general everything feels out of place and waaaaaay too long. I don't think anyone asked for hours! of gameplay as Atreus with stupid chilidish dialogues and playing with animals.

    Bytheway, it's called RAGNAROK. NOT MAMA AFRICA. (no offence Africa). If you wanted tropical jungle and colorful characters go play Horizon (which is much beter than this joke).    … Expand
  11. Not_too
    Aug 15, 2023
    7
    so so average for the amount of praise its getting. This really is just 2018 GOW continued with nothing really big and new to add, except maybe certain sections where you play as Atreus. Huge disappointment
  12. Thunder5555
    Nov 19, 2022
    5
    Good: Christopher Judge (teal'c)... That's it. It's a game with a good franchise name

Critic Reviews

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No score yet - based on 3 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 3
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 3
  3. Negative: 0 out of 3
  1. GameSpace
    May 5, 2023
    70
    The game experience of God of War: Ragnarök is very uneven. The title features battles where main bosses serve as damage sponges, the plot that whiplashes between soul-searching and brutality, the world that is empty in some corners and over-saturated with puzzles in others. At the same time, it is a huge, well-crafted title with good overall story and character development. The complete absence of bugs and the game’s technical performance is more than impressive.
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  2. Shindig
    Dec 6, 2022
    100
    If Sony decided that this will be the final entry for the PS4 platform, I would be more than fine with this decision. Similar to Avengers: Endgame being the final tip of the hat to the original generation of MCU characters, this is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest PlayStation generations of all time, and a suitable send-off.
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  3. Wccftech
    Nov 5, 2022
    100
    The game runs smoothly, without any noticeable frame drop even on the older console, a clear sign that the optimization process carried out by Santa Monica Studios has been flawless... God of War Ragnarok is exactly what we hoped for, and even more. It offers a masterfully told story using a more mature approach, seasoned with a unique setting, a rich characterization of the characters, and challenges that can keep even hardcore gamers busy at the highest difficulties. In other words, it is a title that is simply just too good to be missed.
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