It’s incredibly tight and polished. First rate writing, motion capture, voice acting and story telling. Combat can be difficult, but it’s fair and intense. Exploration and puzzle solving are rewarded but not obtuse. My only complaint is it felt like a DLC to the last game and didn’t add anything really new gameplay wise from 4 years ago. It’s a very linear game, but that’s okay because cinematic linear games have their place and it doesn’t try to overreach.

Don’t get me wrong I like Elden Ring and I’m about 50 hours into my first play through, but Elden Ring feels like a couple generations behind in its presentation. It definitely brought a breath of fresh air to the open world genre instead of being a boring map filled with copy paste points of interest, but everything else felt like a PS3 game. Like walking up to a low poly mostly-static NPC and hitting triangle a few times to get a couple lines of boring dialogue at a time until you hit a loop feels like an MMO from the mid-2000’s. Combat (especially boss fights) is mostly trial and error until you memorize when to press dodge. Compared to the dozens of special moves and combos you can bust out in God of War it feels very shallow and two dimensional. I could go on but I don’t want to give off the impression I hate it or everything it tries to do is worse than GoW which definitely isn’t true, it just wasn’t game of the year for me.