God of War is an excellent cinematic experience with high production values, amazing graphics, decent beat 'em up controls, and somewhat repetitive puzzle design. All in all, I've enjoyed it immensely on PC; however, I have a few critiques. First let's examine what this game does well. The entire game is one shot; there are no camera cut aways (unless you count bringing up the inventory), and the close angle makes the game feel intimate and cinematic. Kratos, the player character, has a long backstory that I, as a primarily PC gamer, was not aware of, although the game will eventually fill you in on some of it. In the opening scene, he's cutting down a tree, one of the last requests of his dead wife, and his facial expressions are instantly readable, and you sense the weight sitting on his shoulders. Throughout the entire game Atreus, Kratos's son, will accompany you, and their relationship is the main focus of God of War. Kratos is gruff, untrusting, harsh, and distant, while his son is precocious, trusting, and optimistic, and watching their characters develop is something I have rarely (if ever) experienced in a video game. As they travel through the realm of Midgard, they encounter a host of gods and monsters, all pulled from the weird, wonderful world of Norse mythology, depicted here in all of its strangeness. Originally released in 2018 as a Playstation 4 exclusive, God of War is gorgeous, its dense environments packed with color and detail. Really, it's amazing they released this title for the last console generation. On PC, it sports graphical improvements, such as higher textures and improved shadows and reflections. Unfortunately, on AMD GPUs, there are occasional frame drops, especially around the Lake of the Nine area. Capping my framerate to 60 lessened the severity of these drops; I noticed a few as low as 54 fps, which isn't very noticeable on a Freesync monitor. Just something to keep in mind, as the experience is apparently much smoother on Nvidia hardware. From a design standpoint, my biggest critique is the busy inventory screen. You can craft and upgrade Kratos's armor, Atreus's armor, and their weapons; additionally, you have several screens worth of skills to buy for both characters with XP. In a game very focused on its characters and immersion, I feel God of War too frequently asks you to pull yourself out of the game world to focus on RPG mechanics that don't exactly fit this type of button masher. Also, as you make your way through the game, you'll find yourself switching between combat, which occurs a little too infrequently for my tastes, and puzzles, which all feature Kratos throwing his ax at something. This puzzle design is a little too monotonous and frequent; I'd much rather focus on destroying dark elves and wraiths. Kratos and Atreus don't often fight more than a handful of enemies at once, and I wonder if this was a design limitation of the PS4 (maybe too many enemies tanked the framerate). These are fairly minor quibbles. If you're looking for a cinematic third person action game, then you can't go wrong with God of War.
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