God of War Raganok

I was most kidding, but... Yeah, I get it - there's numerous enemies with (yellow circle) attacks that leave you staggered for a bit or stunned for a bit longer. I've just been avoiding them or parrying them when I can.

And I'm a complete amateur at this sort of thing. I haven't even played Elden Ring, nevermind beaten it.

Just made my way to that famous Norse city, well outskirts at least. Blimey it’s a bit pretty isn’t it?

First time I’ve been tempted to move the ps5 downstairs to play it on the 4K tv.

I spent a couple of hours last night mopping up some optional content before I pass the point of no return, and I found the



boss to be pretty crappy, in all honesty.



Overall, though, I've still really enjoyed the vast majority of my time with the game. I'm torn between 8.5 and 9 right now, and whichever score it gets will depend upon how well (or otherwise!) it sticks the landing.

I'm planning to wrap it up tonight and get stuck into The Binding of Isaac from tomorrow onwards.

I don't know, you have done quite a good job of it.

I don’t think they are *too* bad. Only two (so far) gave me a problem. The wanker who summons other wankers which makes keeping track of projectiles a massive pain in the arse and the hammer guy because if you mistime a parry, you’re stunlocked into eating another three hits.

Top tip, though: the armour set you get from the girl dwarf turns barehands into the strongest weapon in the game (as far as I can see). The chest armour procs poison on hit and the other two bits amplify poison damage. It rocks the shit out of anything with a name and big health bar, including the berserkers. Melts health and gains stun faster than anything.

I’ve barely used weapons in boss battles so far, unless they have an elemental resistance/weakness.

Yeah, I've been using that poison armour set since I got it. Took bloody ages to start getting mats to upgrade it though, so it was stuck on level 5 or 6 for ages, which probably didn't help the difficulty spikes. Got it maxed out now and I've done all but the last berserker and have most areas at 80%ish completion.

Just about to crack on with the last bit of story after getting massively sidetracked (as in almost 10 hours) by one of the areas opening up.

Heh. I did the exact same thing! Thought I was cruising towards the end, then spent all of last weekend in said optional area.

I was amazed when I got there and I kept finding side quests everywhere. It was pretty great tbh.

Finished the main plot tonight, actually took me quite a while but absolutely loved this, it really ramped up as it got further and further to the end. I won't lie I even got a bit teary eyed. I still wonder why Microsoft can't produce this quality level with their games.

Just finished it too and absolutely loved the ending and everything leading up to it. The last few chapters really kicked it up a notch.

Then I made the mistake of going after the last two berserkers before bed. Fucking hell the very last one is a bit of a step up!

Well, finished last night too. Did it on one difficulty above the middle one.

Good points:
- Story was better than the last IMO, first got the characters right but the overarching narrative didn't grab me. This did the characters as well as the last but also got a much better narrative out of them too.
- The last couple of hours were very good, and delivered a reasonable amount of spectacle that a lot of the game was missing.
- When the combat works well it still works very well.
- Better enemy variety than the first game.
- Muspelheim seemed a bit less annoying this time around? One caveat aside.
- Visually it looks great, of course.
- Good accessibility options, many of which turn into "make the game better", such as getting rid of all the button mashing crap etc.
- The big optional area toward the end is probably the best bit of the game.

Bad points:
- Pacing in the first half is abysmal, it's fine for the open bits but it refuses to get out of second gear for the main missions and spends far too much time walking and puzzling. Dearth of spectacle until at least half way through.
- Traversal speed is irritatingly slow.
- The entire Ironwood section with Atreus was the absolute pits.
- Combat just cannot deal with encounters consisting of large numbers of enemies very well and descends less into fighting things and more just looking at arrows on the edge of the screen. An option for a higher FoV would massively improve things. Just zoom it back in for the cutscenes, put a warning in the menu saying it may look weird at times, job done.
- Too many boss fights rely on large invulnerability windows for enemies where they just dance away etc.
- Muspelheim making you redo challenges like 4 times each minimum.
- The big optional area toward the end is probably the best bit of the game.

I'd give it an 8. Like the last one.

Yeah, the one that made me say 'fuck this' was the 'throw an ever increasing amount of orbs into the void' one and I only failed it once. The task may as well have been 'battle the camera and controls for 10 minutes'.

Done. 30 hours. Will probably mop up some side content, which I thought I wouldnt bother with, but it's fun. 8/10

I've mopped up all of the side content apart from the final berserker and another hidden boss. Tried a build I saw on YouTube which absolutely melted everything else, but still managed to get my shit totally pushed in by the berserker.

So I'm taking a short break/rage quit with 2 trophies still left to go.