I hate the Berserker Tombstone bosses in God of War: Ragnarok. Fuck ’em. There, I’ve said it.
For the unaware, Berserker Gravestones are optional boss fights you can kick off by approaching a marker on the map. Kratos plugs a key into the gravestone, a makeshift arena forms around you, and a hooting dickhole strides through a portal opposite you, keen as mustard to ruin your day. Though many of the berserkers use the same moves, the circumstances of each fight are different. Some of the berserkers arrive in the arena solo. As someone who is not exactly a world champion at splitting his attention, the 1v1 fights are by far my favourite.
But some of them bring friends. Some of them summon mobs to get under your feet and hit you from behind. Some arrive with other, smaller bosses in tow. I truly hate the fights where they bring friends.
These fights are further differentiated by the Berserker’s elemental type and, sometimes, their individual level of aggression. There are Berserkers that prefer to hang back and harass you from afar, and there are Berserkers that are hyper-aggressive and constantly in your face. The cranky ones that want to be up your business are, most often, the ones that bring friends. Easy to pick on me when it’s 7v1, I suppose.
The problem I have with a lot of these fights is that they feel deliberately unfair. Though the game gives you all the queues and telegraphs you need to avoid incoming attacks, you’re still reliant Kratos getting out of the way in time, and his reaction times are anything but consistent. In God of War: Ragnarok, when an enemy rears back and a large red circle appears around the weapon they plan to use on you, you know that attack is unblockable. You must dodge or roll out of the way. On average though, despite my positioning and timing feeling the same, sometimes Kratos would get bodied. The same went for the game’s yellow markers, which indicate an attack that can be dodged or parried. Sometimes my perfectly timed parry would be dismissed, and I’d hand over a solid third of my health bar as a penalty. There’s an argument to be made that tracking the arc of the red marker for the exact moment you need to dodge is the key to success here, but that moment is not always readable when there are five mobs chewing on the back of your head.
It’s frustrating and it feels unfair sometimes!
Seriously though, nothing has delayed my quest to 100% God of War: Ragnarok quite like these screaming, Return of the King skeleton army rejects. I’ve been on a world-by-world farewell tour of the Nine Realms since completing the campaign. Each realm must sit at 100% completion before I am allowed to move on to the next. That part I like! I like trekking back through every realm, completing side quests, and picking up all the doodads I missed during the campaign! It’s the same stuff I loved about the Batman: Arkham games, but in 4K. But in every realm, the Berserker Gravestones have been the thing I’ve left for last. I don’t want to do them, so I avoid them until the last possible moment, the red Tombstone marker taunting me every time I open the map.
David, I hear you say, who cares? Just leave it, mate. Let it go. Play something else! You have forty other games to review right now! To that I say, yeah ok but I want the trophy for knocking them all because I am insane.
Anyway, fuck the Berserker Gravestones in God of War: Ragnarok, they can eat me.
I am going to beat them all though.
You can read our God of War: Ragnarok review right over here if you missed it.
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