I did little to hide my disappointment of God of War Ragnarok back when I reviewed it, shortly after it hit the PlayStation 4 and 5 in late 2022. As an immense fan of the 2018 reboot that brought series’ protagonist Kratos to square off against the Norse gods, seeing what was done as its follow-up ended up being quite a disappointment to me.
Between repetitive scenarios, the bloat of its gameplay and uninteresting segments involving his kid, Ragnarok proved to be the poster child of a problematic trend in videogames, when too much can indeed prove to be a bad thing. When its add-on Valhalla came out, my feelings towards the game mellowed out a bit, all things considered, as the arena battling content had some creative ideas in the way it delivered its story, which ended up being a much better time than the base game.
Now, nearly two years after its initial release, God of War Ragnarok has finally arrived on PC, and like Sony’s previous ports, this one is quite well made, thanks to the brilliant work of development house Nexxes, who have been on a tear when it comes to bringing PlayStation exclusives to the computer. And even on an aging computer like mine, the game runs smoothly, and looks way better than it already did on PS5.
There’s quite a lot to unpack when it comes to options, as there are many, many tweaks to be made when customizing your time playing on whatever rig you may happen to have at home. Safe to say, this is an incredibly well optimized game with much more presets than most PC-only releases, going beyond merely adding ‘performance’ and ‘quality’ modes with mixes of both to suit a variety of tastes.
That means that Ragnarok can be extremely flexible, resulting in a smoothly performing game if you have a system that exceeds its minimum requirements, even if it just barely meets the recommended ones. On my 10-year old i7 processor equipped with 24Gb of RAM and a RTX 3060, which could be considered bottom tier at best, Kratos’ second modern outing runs very well, even when ‘ultra’ is ticked, with nearly no slowdown and/or visual blemishes.
Full Steam integration means that you can now play God of War Ragnarok using an Xbox controller, and it’ll never not feel weird seeing its bottom prompts appear on screen, something that happens often in this game with its numerous QTE events. You’re still free to plug in a DualSense if you have one, which I would recommend in order to enjoy its haptic features, which like Returnal’s port, are in effect here.
One problem that should be addressed is Sony’s insistence on pinning the game under a PSN login before you even start playing it. It started with Helldivers 2 and had a mob of internet haters going after it, continuing into Ghost of Tsushima, eventually coming into play here. That means having to play while online with no viable alternative. On the other hand, if you are a trophy junkie, you’ll have a whole new list to earn, yep!
For as many problems as I’ve had with Ragnarok when it was originally released, there’s no denying that Sony has been doing a more than decent job in bringing their games over to PC, giving an entirely new and way bigger audience a chance to see what all the fuss was about. In God of War Ragnarok’s case, a game with an already strong presentation, that means various options and flexibility, resulting in what could easily be considered the best way to play it, if you haven’t already done so.
