I've been playing one of the biggest games of 2022 - Sony Santa Monica Studio's God of War: Ragnarok - for a few weeks now and it is time to get my thoughts on the whole thing written down. There's a few minor spoilers but no major plot points discussed in this issue, so if you're trying to avoid everything, give this one a miss until you've finished it and it'll still be here waiting for you. Buckle up, lads, this one is a long one.

God Of Chore.

This is what we're calling a 10/10 these days, is it?

I need to stress this before we carry on: I don't dislike God of War: Ragnarok. I don't dislike the previous God of War game. Ragnarok has got stunning visuals and the continued adventures of Kratos and Atreus is a really solid core for a decent, if slightly convoluted story. Visually, it is one of the best you'll see to date and there's great performances by the lead actors and a score that wouldn't be out of place on the big screen. However, it's in the areas that are unique to videogames where it lets itself down. The minute to minute interactions, the core mechanics that make up the bulk part of the experience. Honestly, I've lost count of the amount of times I've received a mission in the game, thought about what it will entail, how little time I'll spend doing actually fun stuff during the course of it and just sighed out loud.

Here's some of the dated crap I've had to deal with in God of War: Ragnarok. This isn't even all of it either.

• Defend a character while they complete a timed task.

• Tracked items with a 'radar' mechanic (in this case, following the direction two wolves are looking as you use them to pull your sled)

• Lengthy 'walk and talk' sections that could've been a cutscene, but instead insist on me pushing forwards for the minimum possible interaction.

• Collect 'em all/checklist sidequests.

• Boss encounters with quicktime events required to finish them off.

• Constantly repeating 'takedown' animations, sometimes seen back-to-back in combat situations.

• Repeating bosses. This time with minions! This time there's two of them! That sort of thing.

No matter how these are dressed up, they're old fashioned filler content that detracts from the stuff that God of War does well - the combat. Kratos' move set has been tweaked a little and the additions to his arsenal are all fantastic and, when you're in the heat of a tough battle, the game still shines. Utilising all aspects of what is quite a complex toolbox of offensive and defensive options is satisfying as hell and, if we think about the whole series of games, not just the two recent entries, has always been the backbone of God of War.

It's a shame, then, that you spend so much time not using it. The game doesn't have particularly interesting or unique movement, so it feels like a slog as you wander between combat encounters and even then, a lot of the combat encounters are with basic enemies that don't really test you. Worse still, is the fact that due to the expanded scope of God of War: Ragnarok's story (which we'll get into in a minute) you end up playing half the game as Atreus, who has a significantly less interesting move set.

All of the Atreus sections are weak. A few of them are actually very light on the combat and are largely there to introduce characters, flesh out plot elements and develop relationships. Unfortunately, these segments go on for far too long and highlight the main issue I have with Ragnarok - it is far, far to beholden to telling the story over everything else. Ah yes, the classic Sony AAA title problem rears its head once again. God of War 2018 was a much simpler tale and much more relatable one, as Kratos struggles with very human dilemmas like confronting his past, becoming a better person for the benefit of those he loves and wondering what his legacy will be as he gets older and has the responsibility of fatherhood. God of War: Ragnarok is a far more fantastical story - a much more complex tale about prophecy and a load of mystical bullshit that doesn't resonate quite as well. It requires a lot more in the way of storytelling sequences, a load more characters and the pacing of the game is all over the place to ensure that the story gets told.

The problem with these Sony AAA titles focusing so hard on the story is that they're videogames, not movies. When you're watching some Marvel film and you've had a prolonged sequence of action packed events, its totally fair to assume that the movie is going to wind down for a bit, change the pace and progress the story, slowly upping the ante and building up to the next action-packed moment. The problem with doing this in a videogame is that games, by their very nature, are an interactive medium. In a game that excels in its combat sections, getting rid of that for a near TWO HOUR section where you walk around a swamp at a glacial pace, solving uninteresting puzzles and collecting items so a relationship can be built between two characters (one of which isn't very interesting, either) just isn't very interesting to play. The frustratingly dull interaction you have with the game during sections like this actively detracts from the narrative side of things because - no matter how good the story/characters are - you're just not having much actual fun playing the bloody thing. Just as things start to heat up as Kratos, as the stakes get higher and higher and the combat starts to get even more challenging and thrilling, you're taken out of it repeatedly to move through tedious, narrative-driven sequences that could be quarter of the length and offer such meaningless interactions they might as well be a cutscene.

These meaningless interactions. Wandering between objectives and finding items or talking to someone after a walk for a few minutes. The game is too polished for these to be truly bad and ultimately they do the job they're designed to do. Some are better than others but they're just to ensure that this vehicle that is carrying some great story from the mind of some creative director to the masses has some kind of wheels on it. Ask yourself this - if all of the rowing around in a boat was removed from the game and you could simply select which combat area you'd like to go to instead, is the game any worse for this? Telling this far more expansive story has come at the expense of the game's pace and makes some sections feel like a chore to play.

I always refer back to my time playing through Uncharted 4. By this point, the series was already seeing diminishing returns. The shooting was never great in those games but they were entertaining thrill rides through some spectacular action sequences. To try to expand on the formula and change things up a bit, there's some open areas in that fourth game that are really ill-advised. They don't offer anything other than distance to cover - the biggest crime a larger play space can commit. In one of these sections, you find a symbol on the floor after a bit of boring exploration. Nathan Drake excitedly informs you that "there must be three more of these somewhere". I thought about how little fun I had finding one of these. I sighed.

To not just shit on Naughty Dog or Sony AAA titles (and I'm sure some of you are aware I love to do that), Uncharted 2 actually gets this right. There's a short sequence where you reach a small mountain village and you slowly walk through it with your guide - a lad called Tenzin. There's a language barrier, so you wander through, taking in the sights and sounds and getting to know the vibe of this place through animations and Nathan Drake's reactions to it. There's barely any actual interaction - you just hold the move the stick to walk through it - but its short and sweet and does a great job in establishing a place and the characters in it. When its followed up by a bloody great big firefight in the village, the stakes are raised by your brief time spent seeing this peaceful place full of people living their lives. They didn't need near two hours of tedious fetch quests to do this. It's like no one actually thought about whether all these story beats make for particularly interesting or engaging videogame sequences and that should be your primary concern, especially with an action game like God of War.

Another issue with the narrative is that so much of what has happened between God of War 2018 and Ragnarok is handwaved away by just saying "ah, its due to Fimbulwinter, isn't it?" or "dwarven magic". They're narrative get out of jail free cards and neither is particularly intriguing. It's not all bad, however. God of War: Ragnarok does some brilliant worldbuilding by reusing a lot of places and assets from the previous game. Some bad actors have said this makes Ragnarok feel 'like DLC', which is a fairly daft way to look at things. By having you go over old ground from Kratos and Atreus' previous adventure, it give this new God of War world a real sense of history and makes it a believable, real place. Sure, 'Fimbulwinter' again acts as a convenient excuse for things to be changed up enough that you're not just replaying the same sections, but seeing landmarks and references to previous events makes things seem very 'lived in'. It's something the Yakuza games do extremely well, with Kamurocho and the way it changes throughout the years despite retaining largely the same content, making it feel as much an important character in the Yakuza storyline as Kazuma Kiryu is. They did a grand job in God of War 2018 in regards to using Kratos' past life over in Ancient Greece to turn him into a much more believable character, with history and believable motives and this world/character building through the series' own history remains God of War's strongest narrative element.

Another issue I have is how this is a game designed to be completed at any cost. You can tailor the combat difficulty to your abilities and this is another Sony AAA title with industry leading accessibility features, both of which should be applauded. The aspect I take issue with is how the game is constantly telling you what to do next, where you should go and even how to solve puzzles before you've even had a second to think about it for yourself. Whatever partner character is alongside you, they're always chirping on about something you should be doing. There's no trust to you to figure stuff out for yourself and - heaven forbid - you don't get to see the whole story play out. This lack of trust in the player filters into some more mechanical aspects too. Yes, there's plenty of parts where Kratos needs to squeeze through cracks in the wall of crawl through some small tunnel, which most people believe is to mask the loading in of the next area. Now, although this can be true of some parts, it isn't always the case. This is often used as a way of taking control away from you so that the designers can ensure that you're going to be looking or acting in a certain way so they can set up something for you to see/do next. This is fine every now and again - its a fairly common part of game design - but in Ragnarok, it's all the bloody time. The game is constantly forcing you into a walk animation, or filtering you through some bottleneck or just straight up taking control away from you so it can set up some narrative moment. Again, this focus on telling you the tale comes at a significant cost to what you spend your time doing when actually playing the game and I find it massively frustrating.

As I said at the start - I don't hate God of War: Ragnarok. When it gets back to doing the stuff that made us fall in love with the series in the first place - genuinely epic in scale scraps with gigantic mythical creatures, utilising a combat system that manages to be equal parts complex and simplistic but always satisfying - it has some fucking brilliant sections, especially in the final third of the game, but by that point you could be 15-20 hours deep before it really starts to take the handbrake off. It had already outstayed its welcome by the time it had really started to look like the five star classic most reviews said it was. Also, despite my issues stemming from how shackled to the story everything is, the story itself is pretty good! Kratos and Atreus' relationship remains the core of everything and although most of the new characters are miss rather than hit, the few that do hit the mark are excellent and most of the returning cast are good value. It's just that most of the minor improvements made to the combat and exploration are overshadowed by the problems that arise from this huge focus on narrative.

To finish up, let's look at my favourite game to put the boot into, The Last Of Us. It's a game with solid if unspectacular stealth and combat and some pretty weak puzzle elements but it has a story and characters that are genuinely beloved by most. So, I ask you this - if the forthcoming HBO TV adaptation nails the story and characters that are the main thing people love about that game and remove the actual GAME part, does it still achieve the same thing people want from The Last Of Us? What, then, is the point in playing the game? Is anyone seriously playing The Last Of Us and enjoying all those times you have to drag a bin around? If the narrative is adversely affecting the interactive elements, you have to ask - would all these people who talk about how emotional God of War: Ragnarok's story made them be better served by this being some Netflix series instead?

For me, that just isn't why I play videogames. It flies in the face of the thing that makes the medium different than films or books or whatever. This ain't no ten and, if you think it is, I think you need to play more actual videogames.

I give it a solid 7/10.

THANKS FOR READING.

Please consider chucking a couple of dollars at my Patreon page if you like this or any of the other things I do.

patreon.com/andihero