On November 9, 2022, with fall just around the corner, Kratos was back in action. After the success of the 2018 reboot, it was time to discover the rest of the story, especially with Atreus. Following its new policy, Sony released God of War Ragnarok on PC on September 20. Is it worth it? Let’s find out.
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Kratos Swings His Axe on Steam and the Epic Games Store
God of War Ragnarok is the second part of a great game. For this second episode in Nordic lands, the idea was to expand Atreus’ story, particularly after the revelation at the end of the first game. The science of beat’em all has been updated, and Kratos is more powerful than ever. However, Ragnarok is more vast with more open areas, numerous side quests and hidden equipment, and plenty of surprises. We won’t go into details about the gameplay system or its strengths and weaknesses here – we’ve got that covered in our review.
Here, we’re more interested in the quality of the PC port of this title. Let’s face it, it’s a little marvel of optimization, despite its 175.7 GB size. The title includes the base game, as plus the Valhalla roguelite DLC, packed with amusing dialogues between Kratos and legendary Mimir.
Impressive Visual Quality with Low Resource Requirements
With an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, an RTX 3060 and 32 GB RAM, God of War Ragnarok works like a charm. Of course, this is a solid setup, but many recent titles are much, much more demanding when it comes to taking advantage of all the available options. Looking at the system requirements offered by Sony, we can see that many gamer PCs, even relatively old ones, are capable of delivering a satisfying experience, at least on the same level as the PS4 Pro and PS5. The only difference is water rendering, which remains below par. However, the lighting is perfect, making this visual masterpiece even more impressive.
Options include the ability to unlock frame rates, integration of AMD’s FSR, NVIDIA’s DLSS, Intel XeSS, and compatibility with ultra-wide 21:9 and 32:9 screens. A VRAM usage display can even help you adjust options to get the best out of your system, without putting your components in a tight spot. Features linked to Valve’s platform are also present, such as cloud storage and a screenshot command.
God of War Ragnarok: Magic on Steam Deck
We also played the game on Steam Deck. Without reaching the same level of performance of course, it’s almost like black magic. The title is fully playable, thanks to a few adjustments in the settings, and delivers a smooth and responsive experience with 30 fps. Obviously, owning the OLED model of Valve’s device is a real plus. As for autonomy, expect sessions to last around two hours.
Overall, it’s extremely difficult to criticize Sony, Santa Monica, or Jetpack Interactive for anything. In fact, there’s even a command to limit Atreus’s interventions, who’s always eager to tell us what to do every ten seconds. But unfortunately, God of War Ragnarok didn’t manage to slip through the cracks when it came to the mandatory connection to a PSN account. Each to their personal judgment, but for our part, we think it’s a shame to exclude an entire community of gamers from such an interesting title.
God of War Ragnarok PC is available on Steam and the Epic Games Store for $59.99.