God of War Ragnarök
(minor spoilers, which I'll try to keep vague)
As far as the gameplay and combat go, this game is a delight. All three of your main weapons are fun to use, there are a ton of special moves and abilities to play around with, and there's a much broader variety of enemies, minibosses, and spectacular boss fights than in the previous game. The game looks fantastic, every world you explore is visually unique and brimming with detail, and the game cleverly balances scripted setpieces with exploration of its semi-open world to tell a linear story while still offering the player plenty of freedom to take the game at their own pace. A lot of effort has even been put into the collectibles and usual open-world shite to make them feel like a worthwhile addition to the game and properly flesh out the deep lore. There are a few story missions that mix things up by having you play as Atreus, and while he's nowhere near as powerful as Kratos, his ranged-based combat is a refreshing change of pace. If I had to nitpick anything in this department, I'd say that the climbing is very slow and tedious, especially compared to most other games with similar mechanics, but that's incredibly minor.
Unfortunately, the one area where this game falls short of the previous one is the writing. The very simple story that was basically just an excuse to focus on the character development of Kratos and Atreus and their improving relationship has been replaced with a sprawling, complex plot with a huge cast of characters, an unnecessary MacGuffin, and a number of plot events that really just don't make sense when you think about them. I hate to be the "plot hole, ding!" guy, but it's impossible not to notice how some of the details of the story are fundamentally nonsensical or outright contradict each other. The game also has a bizarre tendency to spend a lot of time and dialogue setting up characters and events that by all the usual standards you'd imagine to be really important, only to then awkwardly dismiss or give them a poor payoff. Kratos and Atreus go to a lot of trouble to create an enormous monster for a task they have, only to decide after they've already created and summoned the monster that nah, they don't need it after all. A new character is introduced early in the game with a lot of fanfare and setup from the other characters, only for them to do essentially nothing for hours and hours and hours, and when they finally do something near the end of the game, it's a very weak and inconsequential payoff that makes you wonder why they bothered setting up that character to begin with. And worst of all, the final mission of the game, an epic battle between worlds that everything so far has been building up to...is by far the shortest story mission in the game and can be breezed through in about thirty minutes or so. It's an unbelievable letdown.
And yet, none of what I just described is my biggest problem with the game. That would be the dialogue. They went down the Marvel/Joss Whedon route. By that I mean that it's got all the hallmarks of that kind of dialogue, from a vague use of language (characters on multiple occasions refer to magical occurrences as "a thing" or "stuff," for example), to regularly lampshading and making fun of how weird the fantastical events happening are, to, of course, the quips. With the exception of Kratos, who alone always talks like a character in the setting should talk, everyone quips. Mimir quips, Freya quips, the new characters quip, and Atreus especially quips. Just wait until you're playing his solo sections and Atreus starts up his so-let-me-get-this-straight patter. It's disastrously bad, not even remotely funny, and most importantly, doesn't fit the tone of this game or the series at all. I won't bother talking about the Greece-set games, because that's apples and oranges at this point, but in the 2018 game, by contrast, the bulk of the humor came from the conversations between Kratos and Atreus, where Kratos's stoic gloominess and inexperience with parenting sharply clashed with Atreus's youthful optimism and naïvety. They weren't just telling each other jokes, and so none of the humor broke the flow of the game. It was simply two characters having genuine conversations that were nevertheless very funny to the player. Now, of course they couldn't have done quite that with this game, given the improved relationship between Kratos and Atreus, but humor that's unobtrusive in that vein and primarily character-driven would have been so much better than this lazy, bog-standard "so that just happened!" Marvel slop.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.