Ahead of being able to talk in full about God of War Ragnarök with our review, we were given the go ahead to publish impressions from the first few hours of the game, which takes place in Midgard and Svartalfheim. There’s a lot omitted from our experience with the game, and we proactively tried to stay as spoiler-free as possible, but what we have relayed is what the game feels like to play and what sort of cadence you can expect, among other things.

Here’s a snippet:

It’s in Svartalfheim that the mirror to the first game gets put away and instead what we’re given is something akin to the first game’s Lake of the Nine, in smaller (heh) form. There are quests galore in here, and brilliantly designed pockets of the world full of environmental and traversal puzzles, backed by challenging combat and a steady release of varying enemy types. In God of War Ragnarök there are five difficulty options that start at Story, then go on to Grace, Balance and No Mercy before capping off at Give Me God of War. I chose the latter as I Platinum’d God of War and consider myself a fairly good hand at it, and will say that early on things felt pretty dang easy. Almost too easy. However, about two thirds into the Svartalfheim jaunt I started to think I’d been trolled a bit by the studio as the steep jump in challenge had me on the back foot, but it was also at about this point that I started to look more deeply at the available RPG systems, realising I had a handy Sindri available to juice me up with the best gear and upgrades available to this point.

Click here for our God of War Ragnarök hands-on.