🎱God of War (PC) – la recensione

January 2021, XNUMX, I enter the editorial chat and heaving a sigh I remind my colleagues that this review will be difficult, if not the most difficult.

Because there is very little to say, other than that this PC port is the best God of War you can play right now.

Let's talk about porting

I can avoid the emotional or gameplay review, on the other hand the game has its years and the PC port only touches the visual impact and adapts the control system. I have almost completed al 100% the game (I miss two Valkyries) and I explored the huge open world created by SIE Santa Monica Studio for more than 55 hours.

Not even a glitch;
Not even a bug;
Not even a hint of a crash.
Not even a paltry frame drop.

Only in a dialogue in the finale did the voice go out of sync for a line.
THEonly flaw at the level of porting in 55 hours of play.

Really, I'm speechless, every now and then we should take off our storyteller's hat and finish the review with an evaluation and a closing sentence, like: "it's perfect".
But before moving on to the vote I have to tell you just two other things, really two in number.

The graphics

At the end of the review you will find a gallery, feel free to make comparisons with the port for ps5; I took a fleeting look at my friend's house and the texture quality on PC is genuinely superior.

While playing you will never have that feeling of oversharpening (added sharpness) that can be felt in the version for Sony consoles, indeed, the textures do blend to perfection and the “orton effect” typical of the world of photography, seems to have vanished 100%. For example, Kratos' complexion is porous and never "artificial", unlike the console version, we will not even see those slight glows around objects, typical of the upscale.

The graphic settings can be selected through presets or by customizing every single aspect. In my opinion the difference between the various settings is marginal.
It starts with the basic settings which have decent but fairly poor textures, passing through “original” with which the PS4 experience is followed up to Ultra which gives greater “crunchiness” to the images. The other settings, on the other hand, I find them a bit random and imperceptible in the way they are played and in the general performance. To make you better understand I will illustrate everything with a gallery below (you will find the link to download everything in high resolution)

I tested two graphics settings for several hours with two different configurations, I noticed that the DLSS does a great job of optimizing and makes the gaming experience damn smooth. With rtx 2070 super I noticed that on a 2k resolution screen the 120 FPS were "capped" at full, all with custom settings at ultra.

On the other hand, as I reiterated in the previous paragraph, the only substantial difference lies in the rendering of the textures. In fact, the bulk of the game was tested on my home machine: a Ryzen 7 3800x, with nvme pcie4.0, asus prime x570 pro, 64 gb of cl18 ram and an "old" albeit still performing palit gtx1080 and I did not hear any frame drop or loss of rendering.

I played everything with high / ultra parameters and the game, on 2k monitors, traveled smoothly between 65 and 90 frames per second. Decreasing the graphics quality to "original" (ps4 / ps5 native quality) reached 110 fps. In the test I did not have the opportunity to notice framerate or buffering problems, the models loaded instantly and always without any drop in yield.

Basically if we wanted to summarize the graphical picture I would tell you that this port is a version on steroids of the corresponding console. Fluid and optimized even for not exactly brand new machines (a bit like it was for Doom Eternal). Let me explain: the code is written and finished in such a perfect way that it will surely run even on older PC hardware and now no more than the first hair, just like it happened for id Software's fps.

The commands

I will amaze you: I preferred to play the game with mouse and keyboard and indeed, it seemed incredible to me native experience.

Many will say that God of War is a game created for controllers and I can't say that I am wrong. Despite this, the gameplay with mouse and keyboard is precise and satisfying: the movements through the WASD and Mouse combo allowed me to put together very fun and satisfying combos by intertwining the skills of Kratos and the arrows of Atreus.

I mentioned it before for a reason, GOW on PC is like playing Doom Eternal without the shotgun, a flurry of super punches and axes worthy of a shooter as old as Norse mythology.

I don't know how to explain the sensation well but I suggest you try it, it is a whole new experience that is difficult to summarize in words.

In the first God of war for ps2 we all remember the blaze of the phalanx-smashing Quicktime Event required to overcome certain sections of the game. Thankfully, in this GoW you never get to more than three key combinations on the few occasions required, a factor that makes keyboard gameplay much easier and more enjoyable. If you think about it, transposing "triangle circle square and X" on the keyboard in quick combination would certainly have been complex, given the lack of tactile perception of the controller.

Conclusions and Gallery

Before the verdict I have to point out the only ugliness of the game: often the soundtrack gets lost in the volume mixing, so much so that I often found myself having to play with the sound settings to find the perfect acoustic mix. If there really is a note of demerit to put in this port it is on this front, but we are talking about a defect that in something so immense and well done really leaves the time it finds.

At this point, I feel I have talked too much about a port that actually deserves a single granite sentence as a review: “If you haven't played this God of War yet and are a PC Master Racer (vroom), purchase is mandatory".

Really, tweaked to perfection, rendered monstrous, no dips, no bugs, just violence and fatherly love, in its own way.

And to finish a gift, I leave you about twenty screenshots / photos that I have chosen for you to download:

Requirements and notes

The game is downloadable via Steam or Epic Games for an introductory price of 49,99 €, i required for:

Minimum

Operating system:	Windows 10 / Windows 11
CPU:	Intel i5-2500k (quad core da 3,3 GHz) o AMD Ryzen 3 1200 (quad core da 3,1 GHz)
RAM:	8 GB DDR
HD:	70 GB HDD (SSD recommended)
DirectX:	DirectX 11 (Feature Level 11_1)
GPU:	NVIDIA GTX 960 (4 GB) or AMD R9 290X (4 GB)