God of War Ragnarök: The Sequel That Talks Too Much

Kratos and Atreus climb a mountain in Svartalfheim about two-thirds through God of War Ragnarök, and for roughly ninety seconds nobody says anything. The camera holds on the two of them against the dwarven realm’s industrial sprawl, and the silence carries more of the relationship than the preceding hour of exposition managed to. It’s a reminder of what the 2018 game got so right, and a reminder that this sequel doesn’t trust that lesson nearly as often as it should.

Santa Monica Studio shipped Ragnarök on 9 November 2022 for PS4 and PS5, the direct sequel to 2018’s God of War, again directed by Eric Williams after Cory Barlog’s move to a supervisory role. Kratos and Atreus return for a story that resolves the Norse saga’s central prophecy across all nine realms this time, rather than the first game’s tighter journey through a handful of them, with Thor, Odin, Freya and Angrboda all playing substantial roles. The combat is the best this franchise has produced. The script, over a runtime that runs well past twenty hours of main story, is the first place in the rebooted series where the writing stops trusting its own restraint.

Why the combat works: two weapons, one grammar

The Leviathan Axe returns from 2018 with its throw-and-recall mechanic intact, and the new Blades of Chaos — Kratos’s old weapon from the original Greek trilogy, reintroduced here — give the combat a second, faster rhythm built around chained combos and elemental burn rather than the axe’s frost-and-recall patience. Switching between them mid-fight, with Atreus’s own ranged support layered on top, produces the series’ most technically demanding combat to date: axe for crowd control and freeze setups, blades for burst damage and combo extension, shield abilities for parry timing, and a growing roster of runic attacks that reward experimenting with weapon-and-shield pairings rather than settling on one loadout for the whole game.

What makes it work as a design, rather than just a bigger toolkit, is that both weapons share one underlying grammar — a light-heavy combo structure with a parry window and a stamina-adjacent runic meter — so switching between them mid-combo never feels like changing games. That’s a harder problem to solve than it sounds: plenty of action games that offer multiple weapon types end up balancing them so unevenly that players settle on one and ignore the rest. Santa Monica avoided that by making both feel mechanically complete on their own and situationally different rather than objectively better or worse.

The ancestor: this is what a boss rush structure looks like when it slows down

Ragnarök’s realm-hopping structure, where each region culminates in a set-piece confrontation against a named mythological figure, owes a real debt to the boss-rush design this site has traced back to Shadow of the Colossus — a game built almost entirely from sequential named encounters with nothing but traversal between them, examined here. Ragnarök dilutes that purity with far more open-ended combat encounters and side content between the named fights, but the emotional structure — building toward a specific, personally-named opponent whose defeat is staged as the culmination of everything the region taught you — is the same grammar, just given twenty extra hours of connective tissue.

The father-and-son central relationship also has a clear ancestor in this site’s coverage: Ico’s entire design was built around the mechanic of a boy holding a girl’s hand across a crumbling castle, as explored here, where the physical act of connection was the emotional content, with almost no dialogue required to carry it. Kratos and Atreus’s relationship in the 2018 game leaned on the same instinct — presence and small gestures over explanation — and it’s the instinct Ragnarök increasingly abandons in favour of characters narrating their feelings to each other directly.

Where the script loses the thread

The specific failure is worth naming precisely rather than gesturing at. Long mid-game stretches, particularly around Atreus’s parallel storyline tracking down Angrboda and his identity as Loki, resolve emotional beats through extended conversation that states outright what the 2018 game would have let a look or a held silence communicate. Freya’s arc, genuinely one of the story’s strongest threads following her son Baldur’s death at Kratos’s hands in the previous game, still suffers from scenes that re-explain her motivation at length rather than trusting a returning player to remember why she wants Kratos dead. Even the game’s dwarven brothers, Sindri and Brok, whose comic bickering was one of the 2018 game’s best-calibrated tonal releases, get pulled into extended emotionally explicit dialogue in their own late-game arc where a shorter, more oblique treatment would likely have hit harder.

The mountain-climb silence at Svartalfheim works precisely because it’s rare enough to land as a deliberate choice rather than the default mode. A script this confident in its combat design and this talented in its cast — Christopher Judge and Sunny Suljic remain excellent as Kratos and Atreus throughout — had the tools to trust silence more often than it did, and the runtime bloat is a symptom of a story that mistook length for depth in its back half specifically, after a first half that paces itself as tightly as the original.

The side content earns its length, even when the main story doesn’t

It’s worth separating the runtime complaint from the game’s optional content, because the two don’t share the same problem. The nine realms each carry genuinely distinct favour quests — Alfheim’s light-elf refugee storyline, Vanaheim’s Freya-focused chapter unlocked partway through, the Muspelheim and Niflheim combat- and puzzle-arena challenges returning from the previous game with new layouts — and almost none of that side content suffers from the dialogue bloat that slows the main campaign. Freed from the obligation to advance the central prophecy, the side writing tends to say what it needs to and stop, which makes the discrepancy with the main story’s back half even more noticeable: Santa Monica’s writers clearly know how to be economical, and chose not to be in the exact stretches that needed it most.

The armour and skill-tree systems also deserve credit independent of the pacing critique. Crafting materials gathered from realm exploration feed a genuinely differentiated set of armour sets, each nudging the build toward either the axe, the blades, or a balanced runic-attack approach, and the skill tree for each weapon is deep enough that two players can finish the game with meaningfully different Kratos builds. That’s real systemic depth sitting underneath a story that occasionally forgets economy is also a virtue in prose.

The photo-mode of a cast that can carry silence

Christopher Judge’s motion-and-voice performance as Kratos remains the throughline that makes even the padded stretches watchable — a physical heaviness in how Kratos holds himself that communicates restraint even when the script around him is over-explaining. Sunny Suljic’s Atreus carries the adolescent uncertainty of the character convincingly across a script that asks him to be angrier, more secretive and more independent than the 2018 game required. The performances are not the problem here; if anything they make the wordier stretches more bearable than the page count alone would suggest, because both actors find physical beats — a held stare, a shifted stance — that do some of the same work the script itself increasingly declines to trust to silence.

The verdict, and what to play alongside it

Ragnarök is worth playing for a combat system that’s genuinely the peak of this trilogy’s redesigned action, and for a first two-thirds that matches the 2018 game’s writing discipline nearly beat for beat. The back half asks for more patience with dialogue than the combat asks for skill, and that imbalance is the honest note to carry into a purchase decision rather than pretending the whole runtime holds at the same standard.

Anyone who wants the purest version of the father-and-son emotional mechanic this series is built on should also play Ico, which proves the same idea can be carried by a single held hand and almost no script at all. Anyone here for the combat alone will find it worth sticking with to the credits regardless of the pacing complaints above it.

Santa Monica also released Valhalla, a free roguelike-structured epilogue, in December 2023, built entirely around the combat system this review praises and stripped of the main campaign’s dialogue pacing almost completely — runs are short, procedurally assembled from existing combat arenas, and the framing narrative uses Kratos’s own memories to interrogate his past rather than advance new plot through extended cutscenes. It’s the clearest evidence the studio understood exactly which half of Ragnarök people wanted more of: offered a free chance to revisit the combat without the runtime attached to it, they built something that trusts the player to supply their own pacing, run after run, with almost no script standing between the axe, the blades and the next arena.

What the whole trilogy argues

Read across all three PS4-and-PS5-era entries, the arc is one of a studio getting progressively more confident in its combat design and progressively less disciplined in its script, and Valhalla’s existence as a corrective coda suggests Santa Monica noticed the same thing this review argues. The 2018 reboot earned its reputation by proving restraint could carry a AAA action game’s biggest emotional beats without dialogue doing the lifting; Ragnarök’s combat honours that same restraint while too much of its script forgets the lesson that made the reboot worth rebooting in the first place.

Spoilers below

Ragnarök itself — the prophesied battle between the Aesir and the giants — arrives roughly two-thirds through the game and resolves with Odin’s death at Kratos’s hands after a running cat-and-mouse rivalry across all nine realms, while Thor, having broken with his father over the course of the story, dies earlier in a direct confrontation with Kratos that the game stages as tragic rather than triumphant. Atreus’s Loki identity is confirmed explicitly, tied to a prophecy involving Angrboda and a child of their own implied for the future, and the ending sends Atreus away from Kratos to search for other surviving giants, setting Kratos up, for the first time in the rebooted series, to rule as a version of the god he spent two games trying not to become — Sindri’s grief over Brok’s death earlier in the story, and his estrangement from Kratos and Atreus over it, is the other major emotional thread the epilogue leaves only partially resolved.