God of War: Ragnarök review on PC — The return of BOY

God of War: Ragnarök is an excellent game, with a touching story, fast and brutal combat, and absolutely stunning visuals. When it released on PS4 and PS5 back in November of 2022, GamingTrend gave it a perfect score – it’s just that good. Similarly, God of War (2018) received a great PC port earlier that year, running beautifully on a PC or Steam Deck. Many would expect the same level of quality from a port of Ragnarök, but in truth it falls short in a few key ways. PS5 is still the ideal way to play this.

Let’s start with the good. Ragnarök has a great suite of options for players to customize graphics to suit their needs. The game supports ultrawide including 16:10 on Steam Deck, has four different forms of upscaling including disabling it for better Temporal Anti-Aliasing, and of course the ability to adjust the quality of textures, models, Anisotropic Filtering, lighting, shadows, reflections, general atmospheric effects, ambient occlusion, and tessellation. You can also adjust the amount of film grain and motion blur or turn them off entirely, along with reducing flashing. For some reason, graphics options are lumped in with camera controls, though I supposed it all has to do with your screen. The game also has motion aiming, but this will only work using a DualSense controller. In fact, there are a number of DualSense-specific options in here, including full support for swipe/gesture controls on the touchpad – something we’ve rarely seen on PC. It also supports the full range of advanced haptics, so you can enjoy all of the subtle bumps and nudges that were otherwise locked to the PlayStation 5 previously.

On a 4000-series card you’ll find NVIDIA DLSS-FG, DLSS upscaling, DLAA, and Reflex support. For all cards you’ll see a number of presets to adjust quality including texture, model, Anisotropic filtering, lighting, shadows, reflections, atmospherics, Ambient Occlusion, and Tesselation to tweak, with a solid explanation of each one so you have some idea of what that setting will look like when implemented in the game. The game also supports Ultrawide Aspect Ratios (21:9 ultra-widescreen and 32:9 super ultra-widescreen to be specific), as well as a rather lengthy list of various accessibility options including compensation for UI color correction, contrast, aim assist, screen reading, motion and motor accessibility choices, and far more. It’s clear the team wants everyone to play, and they’ve worked hard to make that a reality.

On an RTX 4070, the game runs incredibly well on Ultra Settings with balanced DLSS, getting anywhere from 80 to over 200 fps at 1440p and averaging around 120. You can watch a comparison using an RTX 4090 above. On Steam Deck, the game can hit a fairly stable 30 fps, though you can push it up to 40 with dips by setting the GPU clock to maximum manually. Obviously the RTX 4090 with Frame Gen is going to provide the largest framerate bump, hitting around 100 fps or so at 4K, and going no lower than 90 during the most action-packed scenes. Turning off DLSS and frame generation drops this to a very stable 60fps. The game packs in support for DLSS 3.7, AMD FSR 3.1, and Intel XeSS 1.2 if you want the specifics, with all those advancements imply.

As for the bad, Steam Deck is the best place to start. Atreus’ hair takes on a green hue on Deck, which he certainly rocks but is not what it’s supposed to look like. Steam input presents its own problems, on both Deck and PC. The game has full controller rebinding within the software itself, but if steam input is enabled clicking on this menu will only open the steam controller remapping window. You can remap actions here just fine and it works (most of the time), but this will not alter any button prompts. I like to play with classic controls, light attack on Square, heavy on Triangle, etc., and seeing Triangle pop up when I actually need to press R2 is very confusing. Disabling steam input will sometimes cause controls to stop working entirely. Flynn also encountered a few strange glitches, such as the left stick not responding to inputs occasionally or shaders compiling every single time the game starts up, though we weren’t able to replicate this on Ron’s machine.

As for the PlayStation overlay, there seems to be some confusion as to if it’s required to play the game or not. It isn’t, because on Steam Deck you don’t even have the option to open it, let alone log in with a PS account. The game is also fully playable offline.

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