God of War Review

Rebooting Kratos as a father should have been a marketing angle and instead became the whole structure. The single unbroken camera, with no cuts from the title screen to the credits, forces every conversation to happen in the world, so Atreus develops through what he says while walking rather than in cutscenes. Combat trades the old crowd-clearing chains for the Leviathan Axe, whose throw and recall gives every fight a rhythm built on absence, and the moment the Blades of Chaos return lands precisely because the game withheld them for twenty hours.

The Lake of Nine works as a hub that drains and refills, and Santa Monica's rendering, especially cloth, skin and snow deformation, sat ahead of the hardware it shipped on. Baldur is a genuinely good antagonist and the Norse pantheon is treated as a family rather than a boss list. Enemy variety is thin, troll reskins do heavy lifting, and the realms outside Midgard are underbuilt corridors. Still a technically extraordinary reinvention.