Conclusion

God of War Ragnarök is a phenomenal third-person action-adventure game that runs serviceably on both Steam Deck and ROG Ally. The fantastic performance in the starting area is kind of deceptive, so we recommend reaching the second area of the game, Svartalfheim, before you start to fine-tune your visual settings.

While the game constantly crashed on Steam Deck in Svartalfheim at first, the second patch resolved this issue. Now, the game runs on Steam OS without any major bugs and with zero crashes. You can expect a relatively stable 30 FPS performance with rare drops to high 20s with low settings and FSR set to Balanced. You can increase textures and Anisotropic Filtering to values higher than Low, but be wary that setting them too high can result in traversal stutters since the Deck doesn't have enough memory to seamlessly load new textures.

On the ROG Ally, God of War Ragnarök also doesn't show any major bugs or issues. Everything runs smoothly, and the performance isn't that bad compared to other recent AAA releases, such as Star Wars Outlaws. You aren't limited to the Low preset; you can even set some options to High without compromising performance.

Just note that we strongly recommend setting GPU VRAM allocation to 6 GB if you plan on playing the game with textures set higher than low. As on Steam Deck, setting textures too high with 4 GB of VRAM will result in an occasional traversal stutter when the game loads a fresh batch of textures.

Also of note is the fact that during our almost three-hour, single-sitting ROG Ally play session, we didn't encounter any sign of the memory leak bug that plagued God of War 2018 on PC. After patch 2 went live, we played the game on our Steam Deck for about an hour in a single sitting, and we also didn't encounter crashes caused by the memory leak bug. Your mileage may vary, though, especially if you plan on playing the game on Steam Deck and you tend to have multi-hour gaming sessions.

Graphics-wise, God of War Ragnarök looks excellent. The game is quite a looker even on low settings, thanks to its fantastic art direction that successfully masks any drawbacks stemming from low-resolution textures and less-than-great LOD distances. Settings-wise, most options don't scale that well aside from shadows, which we don't recommend setting above Low, no matter what handheld you own or the resolution you use.

The good news is, as long as you wait for shader compilation to finish, you won't experience any shader or traversal-related stuttering, even on Steam Deck. Increasing settings and running the game at native resolution drops the frame rate considerably, but the frame time graph stays very stable.

The game plays great on Steam Deck's and ROG Ally's inbuilt controls, and we highly prefer a controller over a mouse and keyboard anyway for this game.

When it comes to the gameplay and my personal impressions, I love God of War Ragnarök. The story's filled with interesting moments. The relationship between Kratos and Atreus is complex, filled with genuinely well-written dialog, and free from cheap and overused tropes seen in so many other games. Most other characters are also well-written, with believable motivations and lots of intricacies that slowly emerge to the surface over the course of the game.

The gameplay is great, and the game features a near-perfect combination of set pieces, exploration, puzzle solving, and cutscenes, making it very engaging and a joy to play. The only thing I don't like is the, yet again, too-contrived gear and skill upgrade system that too often breaks the action and makes you spend too much time navigating around the menus. Other than that, God of War Ragnarök is a definite recommendation.