I just finished God of War 2018 because my brother recommended it and it's generally pretty good. I probably never would have played it otherwise because I am not usually a fan of that kind of game and ultimately I still kind of am not - I just do not love the combat system, I hate the 3rd person view making seeing around you annoying with the design philosophy of throwing 5+ enemies you have to contend with that you can't keep track of. The major bosses also had a touch too much of the glorified cut-scene energy for my liking where they didn't feel like actual tests of skill. The only exception to this is the valkyries who where the only actually good designed fights that actually felt like you where having to understand the mechanics and play optimally. Yup, well...
Actually, only like half were well designed. For context I was playing on hard at my brother's behest of normal being too easy (and he was right, even hard was mostly no problem) and the first valkyrie I fought was the one in Muspelheim which I did way as soon as it was available and way under-leveled. It was hard because I had to play near perfectly because she would 1 or maybe 2 shot me, but she had a good number of mechanics that were fair, it really felt like a souls boss having to learn how to deal with each one. After completing it I was very impressed and looking forwards to more. Well, then I found more... what I mainly want to complain about is the valkyrie Kara who is probably one of the worst designed fights I have ever had the misofrtune of suffering through in any game.
This fight is such utter horseshit, It had to have been designed by one of the developer's 5 year old son who's only experience was creating a Mario Maker level where he just put 500 hammer bros on a flat ground. In this horrible fight she intermitadly summons like 5 enemies, and not just things you can take down in a few hits, things you have to focus on for a bit to kill. These are all coming out while she continues to use varied fast attacks you have to focus on. Some of these enemies have a distance closing rush move where they snap to your position and attack... this move did 75% of my health. I already mentioned my problem with the over the shoulder view obscuring enemies behind you, but it's made 10x worse in this scenario. They never stop either, it's not like 2 or 3 summons at set health, no, she'll never stop doing it. There is almost no skill involved, it becomes basically a luck based affair of where she summons the enemies because there are holes you can knock a few of them in to insta-kill them in the couple seconds they are spawning and make their numbers ever so slightly more bearable, but if she rushes to the center or back you're just boned.
When I eventually did it I felt no joy or accomplishment, only releif and hatred towards whoever created this slop. After you beat all the other valkyries you fight their queen who is hyped up as this extremley difficult fight by people, but it took me 1/5th of the time to beat her compared to fucking Kara because you could actually use your skill to counter her moves rather than just get gang-raped to death by poor design. I am truly baffled how this shit got greenlighted, did they just have no playtesters? My brother wanted me to eventually go through the game again in the very hard mode and I might have, but the thought of doing this stupid fight ever again in my life is the deciding factor of why I will never play this game again.
0/10. God of War? More like God of SNORE and Kratos? More like GAYtos. (but it's actually pretty good, 6.5/10)
