The original God of War released in 2005 was a rather… uncomplicated affair. Kratos was mad, there’s Ares, go kill him. The most recent God of War from 2018, on the other hand, goes much heavier in the story department, bringing a much better balance between character development and mythological decapitations. Depending on your preferences as a game player, though, you can tweak the experience further by selecting the ideal difficulty setting for your playstyle. So, what’s the best difficulty for God of War?
God of War has four different difficulty settings, all of which give you a pretty good idea of what they’re about right there in their names:
- Give Me a Story: The easiest setting. Combat encounters are easier to ensure you can experience the game’s story at your preferred pace.
- Give Me a Balanced Experience: The medium setting. Provides a fair level difficulty in combat encounters to keep things interesting, while also requiring you to be more mindful of your expendable resources.
- Give Me a Challenge: The hard setting. Enemies will deal more damage and have more health, drawing out encounters and requiring you to get very acquainted with the game’s mechanics. Will probably also require some grinding to progress.
- Give Me God of War: The hardest setting. Every enemy encounter will be absolutely excruciating, to the point that you’ll need every single upgrade in the game to stand a chance. Note that a game started on this difficulty cannot be changed to a different difficulty.
Best Difficulty for God of War
If you’re playing through the game for the first time, you’ll probably be deciding between Give Me a Story and Give Me a Balanced Experience. Balanced, as the game’s medium difficulty, is effectively the way it’s intended to be played, with just enough challenge to keep things interesting, but not so much that you can’t progress regularly. You might have to do a bit of grinding here and there, but technical skill will get you through the lion’s share.
If you’re not a fan of grinding or are simply not feeling the game’s combat mechanics, you can turn it down to Story to make things a little more leisurely. It won’t be a complete cakewalk; you’ll still need to get the mechanics down, but once you pick up the basics, the rest should fall into place and allow you to experience the game’s award-winning story.
Once you’ve beaten the game at least once, then you can try out Give Me a Challenge. This difficulty requires a more intimate understanding of the combat mechanics, and a fair amount of grinding to keep up with the difficulty curve. A spot of min-maxing savvy goes a long way here, but if this is your second run, then you should already have a good idea of what upgrades to focus on and when.
If you’re still not satisfied after a playthrough on Challenge, you can subject yourself to God of War difficulty. I won’t sugarcoat it, this difficulty is just awful. Every enemy encounter, even the regular ones, can feel like a boss in itself. You will need absolutely every upgrade you can get your hands on just to keep the odds balanced. Of course, with the regular mooks so hard, it should go without saying that the actual boss fights are agony incarnate, with gigantic health bars and decimating damage. If you’re going to do this difficulty at all, I’d suggest saving it for a third playthrough, just in case you get tired of banging your head against a wall and want to back out. I won’t think any less of you for it.
