I'm fine with games evolving, and I'm okay with characters evolving even if I think the transition from God of War to Conflicted Dad is a bit far-fetched. I just think the gameplay is pretty bad, especially in Ragnarök. The over-the-shoulder camera doesn't work very well, the enemies are generic and generally very basic, the parrying mechanics with the yellow/red circles are very on the nose, the combat is boring and very drawn out on the harder levels.

The only boss that made me feel like I was playing a God of War game was Nidhögg. The Thor fight was fine, Gryla was okay. But in previous God of War games, there was a lot of build-up to fighting a boss, you felt like you had a reason for doing so, and the fights themselves were absolutely epic. You'd get a distinct reward for defeating big bosses, like a new weapon, move or at least a meaningful stat boost. Remember climbing Gaia for what felt like hours?

In Ragnarök, a named boss is often just some rando with a generic name that shows up out of nowhere, has 3 attacks, 1 phase and a massive health bar. You're picking up generic resources here and there and have browse around your bland menus to see what piece of gear that it upgrades. It's very forgettable. Your big abilities like the Runics can easily punish you rather than help you, and they're on a massive cooldown. They're pretty much useless or even counterproductive for the first half of the game.

The "platforming" is absolute shit, in fact it's no platforming at all, it's just linear with platforming aesthetics. There's no pattern for what obstacles Kratos can traverse, except you need to look for the circle on the HUD for context-sensitivity (and I guess the paint on cliffs indicating that THIS IS THE PATH. So if the over-the-shoulder combat is bad, the camera is bad, and it means that we can't have platforming, then what exactly did we gain from this change?

It's a shame too, because the dialogue and character design was actually very good. I love how they portrayed Odin and Thor. It's obvious that the devs are talented and resourceful, it just feels like they made a lot of bad choices for how to design the levels, combat, menus and progression.