Introduction

Daddy and the Boy 2: Electric Boogaloo. No, It’s Always Sunny fans, this isn’t the triumphal return of Charlie and Dennis’s male stripping act. Today, we’re talking about, and testing, God of War Ragnarök, a sequel to the phenomenal soft reboot of one of the best hack-and-slash series ever.

In the second part of the series, Kratos and Atreus fight their way through some of the Nine Realms of Norse mythology, trying to unfold Atreus’ destiny during the literal end of the world. The game looks impressive, features loads of stylish and vicious combat encounters, a number of impressive boss fights, and tons of environmental puzzle solutions of which you won’t hear about after, like, seven seconds, thanks to a new accessibility feature that makes your companions stay quiet while you’re racking your brain trying to solve them.

The PC version of God of War Ragnarök was developed by Jetpack Interactive, the same studio tasked with porting the 2018 God of War to PC. Let’s hope they did a better job this time. Don’t get us wrong, the PC version of God of War was generally pretty solid, but the infamous D3D crashes and the memory leak bug somewhat soured the experience, especially on Steam Deck, where many gamers had crashes during longer play sessions.

God of War Ragnarök uses an in-house engine made by Sony’s Santa Monica Studios, which is behind both the PS4 and PS5 versions. The studio is also responsible for each and every God of War title to date. The game comes with impressive visuals, lots of visual options to tweak, support for DX12 and every major upscaling tech available today—DLSS, FSR, XeSS, and TAA upscaling—as well as both DLSS and FSR frame generation tech.

This handheld performance review will evaluate the performance of God of War Ragnarök on Steam Deck LCD and ASUS ROG Ally, offer optimized settings for both, and discuss out-of-the-box experiences on Windows and SteamOS.