In recent years, no publisher has pushed harder to get their games into the PC landscape than Sony. From Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves to Spider-Man and God of War (2018). For the most part, the overall performance for many of these ports has been great.
Yeah, The Last of Us was a hot mess at launch, but developer Iron Galaxy Studios kept producing a steady stream of updates that eventually got it running smoothly on PC and achieved the Steam Deck verified status.
I remember when Sony announced God of War Ragnarök for PC and most of the chatter among PC / Steam Deck gamers was about the system requirements. On the low end, GOWR would need at least 8g RAM and AMD Ryzen 3 1200.
The Steam Deck has 16GB of RAM and AMD RDNA 2 graphics with 8 Compute Units which have been able to perform above gamers’ expectations with the games it is able to bring to life on the Steam Deck, most notable Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut which is fully playable Deck while labeled unsupported.
It only took a few days for God of War Ragnarök to get verified status and many contribute this to Sony removing mandatory PlayStation login when playing on Steam Deck only.
Now this very well could have played a factor but I also want to give praise to developers Santa Monica Studio and Jetpack Interactive for doing everything possible to make sure God of War Ragnarök was fully playable on the Steam Deck.
God of War Ragnarök on PS5 (our review) is visually a work of art. As you traverse the multiple locations you will instantly feel immersed in the environment. From the dark eerie caves to the dense forests, each location pulls you in, layered on top with some amazing ambient sounds and it’s a chef’s kiss of an experience to explore. The question now is how would all of this look on the Steam Deck. Well as you can see from my screenshots, with performance overlay on you can expect 34-60 FPS, CPU usage in the mid-60s, and GPU pushing at a high 80s to 90s depending on what’s happening on screen.
If you played God of War 2018 then you know the series gameplay is a mixed bag of combat, puzzle-solving, and exploration. That all returns in Ragnarök. With that said, the overall performance remained consistent in all but ONE area. This exception is when traveling around in the canoe. I’m assuming it’s due to the various draw distance that occurs as you canoe around. I encountered some frame drops at times going below 30 FPS. Now you can make some graphical tweaks to try and reduce this from occurring but after some tweaking, I noticed little to no difference since this depends on what part of the river you are in and what’s off in the distance.
On the gameplay front, the controls are responsive and mapped out as expected with one cool addition. The top left back button freezes your axe instantly. Remember, you can map any button to these 4 back buttons and once you get used to mapping them for things like pulling up the menu or viewing the map it almost becomes a must-have for every game.
Now I must talk about my favorite accessibility option in God of War Ragnarök. When playing on a smaller screen like the Steam Deck, I tend to make the font size larger but in Ragnarök, the voice narration is top-notch and sounds like a real person, not that generic robotic voice we usually hear. It does a great job of reading out the abilities of whatever new items you pick up while on the menu and having the item selected. Now it doesn’t read every little thing which is fine but I must admit I found this to be a great feature and extremely helpful in reducing eye strain.
As I mentioned in my opening, we are getting a steady stream of Sony-exclusive ports coming to PC and I’m thrilled to see the developers are taking the time to ensure these releases can play on the Steam Deck without requiring much to no user tweaking. As of right now, God of War Ragnarök is a fantastic game, and more so when playing on the Steam Deck. Just make sure you have plenty of storage space because it’s a hefty 176GB install.
This review was written based on a digital review copy of God of War Ragnarök for the PC provided by Sony Interactive Entertainment.
