God of War : Ragnarok

Date Completed: April 23rd, 2023

God of War was one of my favorite games of 2019 and I had been looking forward to the sequel since it was announced. I received it for Christmas 2022 and started playing it shortly thereafter.

I really got into the original game and tried to find every item, beat every enemy and complete every quest. This time around I found myself getting bored and took several long breaks from the game. One of the challenges of a narrative driven game is that the game often gets in the way of telling the story. I think that’s what was happening here. In order to stretch the playtime longer than 20 hours the narrative keeps jumping back and forth between Kratos and his son Atreus and you alternate between controlling each. It was funny at first (Atreus trying to open a treasure chest the same way as his father for example) but eventually I came to dread these transitions. One of the consequences of these transitions is that you’d often explore an area as Atreus that had obstacles you couldn’t pass because Kratos wasn’t in the party. If you wanted to explore that area fully you’d have to return later to do so. This meant that months after having visited an area in real-world time I would return as Kratos and have to remember what I’d done there the first time.

I tried to avoid spoilers online but these days that can be very challenging. One of the potential spoilers was about the ending and if it had been accurate this could have been one of the best endings to a story ever. I’m not going to spoil the ending but I will say that the ending fell short of what I had heard. The ending set up the possibility of a sequel that could still offer that ‘best ending ever’ but didn’t offer that conclusion itself. I’m excited to see where the sequel goes but I’m wary of being disappointed if the next story falls short of what it could have been (e.g. Horizon II : Forbidden West.)

Very early in this game you meet both Odin and Thor who were both notably absent in the first game. While they didn’t match up with the original Norse mythology the portrayals of Odin and Thor were one of the highlights of this game. Minor spoiler – during some of the Atreus sections Thor joins you briefly and that is a lot of fun. Odin’s portrayal, while not as compelling as Thor, is still very good and he makes an excellent villain. I won’t say how the story arc for each of these villains ends but I will say I liked what they did with one character and didn’t care for how they handled they other.

God of War, meet Thor.

Other than story or combat there are lots of other things you can do in the game such as complete quests, go on dragon hunts, find collectables, look for hidden ravens or fight berserkers. I preferred the side quests to the game itself so after beating the game I ended up going for the Platinum. I will admit to cheating a little bit however. I dropped the difficulty down to the easiest level (which was still surprisingly challenging) to beat the last two ‘super bosses’. I had spent several days on the first game developing the skills necessary to beat the Valkyrie Queen on Hard mode and I didn’t want to dedicate that level of effort here. While I might feel a little ashamed of this I’m sure I’ll get over it.

Collectable Lore

God of War : Ragnarok is a great game punctuated by several dull sections. It falls short of the greatness of its predecessor but is still one of the best games of the year. It sets the developers up for a great sequel and I hope that opportunity is not squandered.

Is it fun: Yes
Score: 8/10
Length: 60 hours
System: PlayStation 5
Genre: Action / Adventure

Puzzling Places

Date Completed: February 11th, 2023

With the PSVR2 out any day I was on to a bit of a VR gaming kick and Puzzling Places seemed like something anyone could enjoy. My first reaction was a bit of disappointment. The textures in the PSVR are a bit low-resolution and I was hoping for a higher level of graphic quality. My disappointment was short lived however as the game is extremely fun.

The smallest puzzles are only 25 pieces and can be put together relatively quickly. This became a quick favorite for everyone in the household (except my wife who is migraine prone) and all of my kids enjoyed piecing these puzzles together. I finished all of the available puzzles on 25 pieces and then I decided I’d try a 400 piece puzzle without the guide pictures. This took me several days but eventually I cleared it.

The game has been supported with new puzzles which magically show up and there are additional puzzle packs that you can buy (I bought one on accident but am not upset). My PSVR2 arrived after I had completed all of the puzzles on the PSVR version of the game and the developers kindly offered a free upgrade. The game looks A LOT better on the PSVR2 but I actually prefer the original PS Move controllers to the PSVR2 controllers.

ON the PSVR2 – Looks even better in VR!

I think this is a game I’ll keep on both my PS4 and PS5 as something that can be gone back to over and over again.

Is it fun: Yes
Score: 8/10
Length: 6 Hours
System: PlayStation 4/5 – PSVR/PSVR 2
Genre: Puzzle

Horizon II : Forbidden West

Date Completed: March 20, 2022

Some spoilers. Read at your own risk!

Horizon : Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games ever and (in my opinion) one of the greatest science fiction stories of our time. I had been looking forward to the sequel for many years and and when I heard it was going to be coming out for the PS5 I knew this would be a good opportunity to grab a PS5. If I could find one in stock that is.

Luckily my wife decided to get me a PS5 for Christmas, assuming I was able to find one for her to give me first. Fortunately I have a friend who monitors PS5 availability as a hobby and was able to determine that Walmart was going to have several units available for members of their rewards program. I signed up and it worked out nicely. The PS5 arrived a few weeks before Christmas and I gave it to my wife so she could give it back to me on the 25th. Now that I had the hardware all I had to do was wait for launch day.

I ordered a physical copy of the game with launch day delivery so I had to wait HOURS before I was able to start playing. The game plays pretty much like the original but with the many refinements you’d expect from version 2 and higher-end hardware. You start out playing a tutorial mission that introduces some new characters, new enemies and sets up the story. After completing the tutorial you’ll be dropped off in the Forbidden West where things really get started.

The game is just as fun as the original to play. There are lots of new machines to fight including a giant armored turtle called the Shellsnapper (which still caused me lots of trouble later in the game) and the Tremortusk the first of which I encountered killed me many, many times.

Unsurprisingly the game explores the area to to the ‘West’ of where the original game took place and is set in what used to be the western United States. Over the journey you pass through several ruined familiar places such as Las Vegas and San Francisco. My Sister lives in Las Vegas so I enjoyed taking screenshots of that area and sending them to her. They did a great job making these locations interesting and filling them with likable characters.

Las Vegas isn’t quite the party town it used to be.

Unfortunately this game does have one strong negative to it and it’s the story. In fact, I hated the story so much that I like the original game a little less than I did before I started this one. The original game told a story where due to their own hubris humanity had become completely extinct. Prior to their inevitable doom Elisabet Sobeck had devised a scheme to save humanity by creating a series of artificial intelligences that would be responsible for cloning and growing new generations of humans, plants and animals when the world was livable again. The idea of a universe without human beings is what really made that story stand out to me but this game ruins that premise.

In Forbidden West you learn that humanity never went extinct after all. A second, evil plan to save humanity also succeeded. Several biologically immortal oligarchs from the 21st century (many of which were personally responsible for the destruction of the world) had flown to another world which they have since also destroyed (because they’ve learned nothing after 1000 years of immortality) and have returned to Earth to be total dicks. Hilariously it also turned out that Ted Faro, the man responsible for the ‘Faro Plague’ that wiped out all life on Earth has also become an immortal mutant and he has been suspended in eternal nightmare deep in his evil-villain doomsday sex bunker. Not only are these plot points stupid, but they make one of the most interesting premises of the original game (total extinction of humanity) not technically the case anymore.

The over-arching plot is that everyone wants to get a copy of the computer program called ‘GAIA’ so they can run the terraforming system that makes a dead planet livable. Funnily enough each side has different components to GAIA so if they just agreed to trade floppy disks everyone could have had a copy and been on their merry way. Apparently that would have been too hard as it would have involved ‘asking nicely’ so instead they hatched numerous overly complicated schemes that wasted tons of time and resources, although made for terrifically exciting game play.

I had two friends who were playing through the game about the same time I was and we’d periodically share where we were and what we thought was going on. Games like this are a lot more fun when played communally and even with the goofy story this time around I’m looking forward to doing so again with either an expansion like The Frozen Wilds or Horizon 3. The only issue with playing a game this way is that I didn’t want to be the last person to know what was going on so I kept pressing forward at a rate that wasn’t necessarily healthy for my marriage. My wife started calling herself a Horizon widow which was my first clue to start paying a little more attention to her.

The last thing I’ll mention – never play a game right after launch! The game was super buggy and was frequently being patched while I played it. One bug I accidentally triggered made it impossible to complete one of the side quests. Another time I fell through the world into limbo and the only way out was to load a recent auto-save which caused me to lose 15 minutes of progress. I had one bug trigger multiple times where if I heard a tone and turned left the PS5 would crash and restart. Things seemed to settle down by the time I got to the end of the game but it was a frustrating run there for awhile.

Platinum baby!

Overall this was a lot of fun and while I was disappointed with the story the rest of the gameplay is more than enough to make up for any deficiencies. Highly recommended.

Is it fun: Yes
Score: 9/10
Length:  ~70 Hours
System: Playstation 5
Genre: Open World, Third-Person Shooter

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla

Date Completed: February 13th, 2022

After receiving a PlayStation 5 for Christmas 2021 without any games I was looking for something to play to fill the time until Horizon : Forbidden West was released. I eventually narrowed the options down to Spiderman : Miles Morales or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Both games had similar reviews and the cost was identical at the time. Vikings or Spiderman isn’t an easy decision but eventually I landed on Vikings.

Plenty of Amazing Scenic Shots

This was the first Assassin’s Creed game that I had ever played and it will also be the last Assassin’s Creed game I ever play. I didn’t know anything about the series besides it’s been around a long time so I didn’t expect it to be so weird. I thought it was going to be a standard Viking story but it intersects with the Assassin’s Creed mythos which involves Alien civilizations, the creation of humankind and the destruction of Earth. It was all a little too far-fetched and silly for my tastes.

Helping people with their problems is what this game is all about.

You play the role of a Viking warrior named ‘Eivor’. When you start the game you have the choice between a Male or Female ‘Eivor’ or oddly you can choose a character who randomly changes gender as you play the game. I wasn’t sure what to do with these options so I looked up online what was suggested. I found a posting that said “The choice doesn’t matter, but the male voice actor is better than the female one” so I ended up choosing male. The male voice actor was fantastic but it’s obvious that the game intended Eivor to be a female. There were several prompts or recorded conversations that referred to me as a ‘she’.

Highly customizable settings. Very important.

Knowing absolutely nothing about Assassin’s Creed I was expecting a short, mission based stealth and infiltration game similar to Splinter Cell or something like that. What I got was a massive open world action game with hundreds of hours of game play and tons of side quests. You start in a bleak, snowy Scandinavia and after eight hours just when I began to feel like I was making progress towards you suddenly sail away to a lush, green England and an all-new, much larger map where the exploration starts anew.

I did NOT expect to be crashing ships into Castles in this game.

You do engage in a fair amount of Assassination in this game however there really isn’t any need for stealth. You can go charging in to almost any fight in a blaze of glory and if your level is adequate you should do just fine (although stealth is almost always easier). Combat is a little more graphic than I expected so I would usually kick the kids out of the room when I was killing my many, many foes.

England sure looks weird from the top of this mountain.

The controls for the game are a bit different than most third person action games and it took me about two weeks to get used to them. There is no jump button and the dodge button wasn’t where I expected it to be. I suspect I could have reprogrammed these but I typically don’t change settings unless they’re particularly odious.

So that’s how that song goes…

The production values of this game are fantastic. A lot of care went into this game. The music, characters, side quests, maps and extras are all really well done. In spite of the control scheme and weird story it was a lot of fun to play.

Out for a night on the town.

I was intend for this to be a ‘time-filler’ for the month of January while I waited for Horizon : Forbidden West (Horizon : Zero Dawn is one of my favorite games ever) to be released but the game is so long that I found myself rushing through it and playing nights and weekends to get it done in time. I ended up giving myself tendonitis but I made it!.

Common enough problem.

I understand that there is some additional DLC available now that was not when I finished the game. Some of it appears to be paid DLC but there may also be additional free DLC. I’m not sure if I’ll ever go back and check. I enjoyed the game but I don’t think this is a world I’m excited about spending more time in. The over-arching Assassin’s Creed mythos is just too weird.

Time to drive my ships to new lands…

After finishing the game I discovered this fascinating interview between the Narrative Director of the game and Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford who consulted on the game. There may be spoilers so watch at your own risk!

Is it fun: Yes
Score: 8/10
Length:  ~100 hours
System: Playstation 5
Genre: Action