If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. Times change, and the new God of War, part sequel (the story continues from where it left off) and part reboot (the adventure is slower and the characterization more thoughtful), has more heroic ambitions for the notorious antihero. He and his franchise thrived on adrenaline, any inner turmoil serving as a springboard for ultraviolence, rather than an emotional well to be drawn from. Last we saw Kratos, he still enjoyed getting hammered on a bottle of red, participating in a well-lit orgy and slaying Greek gods in ways that a teenager might storyboard onto the back of a ruled notebook. That this serene moment doesn’t ring false, let alone veer into tedium, speaks to the tremendous heavy lifting done by the creators of God of War to shift the tone, the style and the expectations of one of the most beloved but also most violent and debaucherous franchises in modern games. Kratos and son show the orator respect, only interrupting with the occasional question for clarification. The head dishes with the gusto of a gossip columnist and the smoothness of a public radio host. About midway through God of War, Kratos and his son Atreus sit in a canoe in the middle of a lake, listening intently to a disembodied head recount the tawdry and tragic dramas of the Norse gods.
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