What Are You Playing 5: New Thread+

[Zevox]

I agree. I've been replaying it too, after watching my wife play it and helping her with the valkyrie fights.

The one complaint I have is how much your stats matter.

Eh, I have mixed thoughts about that. For an action game I'd normally prefer just not to have stats at all (ala Devil May Cry), but God of War does it in a way that I find mostly unobtrusive. Your level doesn't increase your stats; your stats increase your level, which is just there to give you a general measurement of where you're at in the game's power rating. So you have a fairly clear measure of how strong you are, and the game makes it easy to compare to your level to the enemies' since it shows enemies' levels alongside their health bar - and even color-codes them for how dangerous they are. And I tend to find that I can take enemies up to 2 levels higher than me, personally, it's only once they get to 3 higher than me, and most of their attacks become unblockable and, often enough, one-hit-kill shots, that I have to back off.

And that doesn't really happen often - most of the time you only tend to encounter enemies that are outside of your level range when dealing with the Rift battles. Which, yeah, I kind of wish they'd just tailored those to the level you can be expected to be at when you find them, but with the game's generous auto-saves there's not much consequence to trying one, finding out it's too tough, and dying; you just back away after the reload and come back later, when you're closer to the level it wants you to be at. Or you can stubbornly power through it and just try to cheese out a win without ever getting hit, I know I did that against a few of these on normal difficulty (they tend to have too much health for me to be willing to do that on hard).

Slightly more annoying to me is the whole equipment thing, but your regular gear is found infrequently enough to that it mostly doesn't bother me. You do get inundated with Enchantments at times, though, and those tend to be where the "this seems like generic filler equipment" nuisance comes in for me from time to time. But it's a minor irritation on the whole.

Sometimes my attacks have hitstun, but then they don't after hitting the enemy a few times.
Sometimes one attack in a combo hitstuns an enemy, on other enemies it doesn't. Same thing when it comes to launching an enemy in the air.
Some blockable attacks show an indicator that they can be blocked, while the fastest attacks in the game don't have an indicator (so you don't really know when to block).

Well, yeah, those first two are typical of action games. Enemies sometimes have animations during which they won't take hitstun - effectively super armor from a fighting game - and different enemies react differently to attacks, with weaker ones being more likely to be easily affected by hitstun and ones that are supposed to be bigger and stronger being more likely to be able to ignore it. You just kind of have to learn which is which.

As far as attack indicators, actually that white attack indicator ring doesn't indicate a blockable attack, it indicates a guard crush one - you can parry those, but block them and you'll get put in a stagger animation that leaves you briefly vulnerable (though usually it needs to be a different enemy taking advantage of it, not the same one that guard crushed you). Regular attacks don't have any indicator because all defense options work against them just fine.

I tried playing it on the harder difficulty, but it took so goddamn long to kill the easiest enemies. You could batter one of the simple Draugrs into the air into a slow, 5-hit combo, and you might take out a fourth of his HP (assuming one of his friends don't gank you in the back during it and take out a third of your health).

It can feel that way at the start of the game, when all you have are your basic attacks, but once you get going it's not so bad. Especially once you have the big charge-up heavy attack overhead cleave thing.

And hitstun matters a lot in this game, you don't get many ways of dealing with crowds if you can't stun them.

Runic attacks and Atreus' support are your main tools there - especially once he gets the lightning arrows and you upgrade them for chain lightning, but even before that he can be effective as a distraction.

Speaking of, that's something else the game deserves a lot of praise for: Atreus could have been the thing that killed the game, both story and gameplay wise. It would have been so easy for this to have been "God of War: Escort Mission," with an annoying, useless kid tagging along that you need to keep safe all the time and is just a huge pain in the ass. Instead, you never need to worry about his safety (which is admittedly a bit unrealistic, but still far better than the alternative), plus he's genuinely helpful in combat and only gets a lot more so as the game goes on. And of course, story-wise, he's not annoying at all and the relationship between him and Kratos is the game's heart and soul. The devs deserve a lot of credit for how damn well they pulled off a concept that could easily kill other games.