‘God of War’ On PC Is Another Reminder Of Its Majesty – Game Review
In my time as a gamer, I’ve mostly been a console player as I could never really afford even a decent gaming PC, let alone understand how to approach building one. I started gaming on PC after managing to get my hands on an ASUS ROG Strix gaming desktop in 2021—the last one at my local Sam’s Club that I was fortunate enough to secure in the thick of the pandemic.
Despite God of War titles living exclusively in the Sony ecosystem, their announcement of a PC port had the entire gaming community rubbing their hands together in understandable excitement over the potential enhancements to Santa Monica Studio’s and Sony Interactive’s 2018 masterpiece. The $49.99 PC version of God of War arrives this Friday on Steam and several other PC game storefronts.
What more can be said that hasn’t been already about Cory Barlog and company’s boldest take on Kratos, as well as the significant hold the word “boy” had over pop culture lexicon the last three years? Christopher Judge and Sunny Suljic’s chemistry drove home the major themes that occupied the world of the soft reboot that saw Kratos as an aged, brooding father, trying mightily to save his son from the fate of growing into the man he’s become. Add to that the grief of losing his wife and the ever-present threat of mythical beasts and Norse figures looking to throw hands with him, and you begin to see why the latest God of War still resonates with so many gamers even after several titles.
Playing the title on PS4 was an unforgettable cinematic experience that was only complemented by the ‘Enhanced Performance Experience’ made available in the PS5 patch that dropped for the game in February 2021. The free update for next gen players brought 60 FPS gameplay, 4K Checkerboard Resolution and 2160p capabilities (4K resolution). Enter the PC port—a title scores of gamers online have been desperately waiting for that allows greater graphical capabilities depending on your setup.
My gaming PC has an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, as well as 16 GB of RAM (and if it makes any difference, my OS is the latest edition of Windows 11 Home). As soon as I launched the game, I sped over to the graphics settings to see what I could change and to what degree. I was able to max my settings out at “Ultra”, allowing for a clearer and brighter picture than when playing on my PS5. To better understand just how technical the specs of this PC port were, I headed over to Ars Technica, where Sam Machkovech noted that “GoW‘s PC port offers two nifty performance-enhancing options: Nvidia’s deep learning super sampling (DLSS) technology, which is exclusive to “RTX”-branded GPUs, and AMD’s FidelityFX super resolution (FSR) technology, which works on many more GPUs.”
The game’s performance ran silky smooth—I’ve been so accustomed to using a controller on my PC that connecting the PS5 controller to play GoW was a must, enhancing the experience from what was with a PS4 pad. I’ve got a standard monitor, with an active signal mode of 1920 x 1080 at 60 Hz but the image was stunning throughout. Instances of frame drops were few if any, and the overall experience remained as immersive as it was on console even with a smaller monitor. Screen tearing was rare but visible, as I’m certain my monitor (and PC in general) felt the weight of those Ultra Settings.
Ultimately, the PC port of God of War shows the title has aged just as well as Kratos, and it’s still a gorgeous meditation on grief, lineage, fatherhood and family. My fight with Baldur and reconnection with the Blades of Chaos were brilliantly captured on screen, just as they were on my PS4 and even still on my PS5. Kratos’ journey through self-reflection and reconnecting with his son are amplified further by the exceptional chemistry between the actors in a game, considered by many, to be the greatest Sony saga in recent times. God of War on PC is a must, even if you’ve played the life out of it on console.
God of War is now available on Steam and other storefronts for PC.
