Good
- graphics look great. The structures were very impressive.
- autosave makes taking breaks easier.
- i like the addition of climbing parts. And the sliding parts were done quite well.
Bad
- badly placed QTEs made enjoying any cutscene unenjoyable since I had to always focus on the corner of my screen to see if a prompt will pop up
- the QTE button color was the form of a light colored orange amber, meaning if it overlapped a bright colored area in the fight, it's really hard to see. Quite a few times I was punished because I simply couldn't see the QTE prompt. Example being the bright bird from the Fury.
- The puzzles had only one solution, and despite finding a very logical solution to the puzzle on your own which should work, didn't. Only the developer's logic was correct. There were many false queues in puzzles which made solving them a frustrating experience.
- Not enough cutscenes where Kratos speaks. He's also much more passive than other God of War games which is really out of character. I personally really don't like it. I liked Kratos for the rage filled vengence. Not this pussy.
- The parry system is terrible. Not only do I now have to press two buttons L1 and X, but also have to press them one after the other. Parrying is supposed to be a fast execution testing the player's reflexes, but making it this hard to input, makes the experience very frustrating. Especially because some of the enemies have very ambiguous attack animations, the hitbox sometimes come out later. Also sometimes parry would just straight up whiff when it clearly should have countered. Sometimes the enemy is too far and the counter after the parry misses, and I end up getting punished instead, which feels very unfair. The inability to reflect projectiles with parry was also crappy.
- having to press two buttons to grab was also annoying. In all GoWs it was just circle. Now it's R1 and circle, which adds and extra layer of annoyance when I'm already juggling trying to hit two buttons to parry.
- for a first time play through it's really hard to use much of the rage meter, since without getting accustomed to the fights, rarely could I go on without damage to fully build the meter and use rage, which made it useless.
- Magic wasn't clearly defined. Until you've leveled your weapon to like level 3, you can't see that the last level up would give it magic. This caused a lot of confusion, as I see I have a magic meter, but seemingly no magic attack. Not until I looked up that I had to upgrade my weapon fully to unlock it, did I know.
- I also ran into quite a few glitches. One where the giant hammer enemy fell through the elevator, and I couldn't proceed the blocked exit because it required me to kill all enemies.
- not seeing any of the gods, like Athena, Zeus, or any of the titans really made the game not feel like a God of War game. As those are staple characters. Aside from Kratos himself, you pretty much ONLY see Furies.
- the camera angle is terrible sometimes. It could be zoomed too far out and I just can't see whats going on. Sometimes it's fixed in a place where if there are big enemies, I can't see Kratos and the smaller enemies attack me. Meaning if I'm trying to parry, I end up whiffing and getting attacked just because the game blocked my view. I simple fix would have been to make the large enemy momentarily transparent when walking in front of the camera.
- overall, they tried to change what wasn't broken. God of War was supposed to be a straight forward hack and slash game, Adding the extra control schemes made the experience more complex than it needed to be. This isn't Sekiro, it's God of War. Don't fix what wasn't broken.