[Dudeman112]

The latest God of War just needed more actual bosses.

Feels like the queen bitch valkyrie was the only encounter where they actually decided to push the combat. Imagine if Sekiro or Souls games only had a couple of bosses that felt like real bosses.

Overall a phenomenal game, though.

[mrtranscendence]

We must have been playing different games, or I’m just terrible at them. I found the non-queen Valkyries immensely difficult, certainly boss level, and some of the other boss-like encounters took me a few tries.

[Dudeman112]

Ah, I think there's an important distinction here my original comment didn't properly touch on: it doesn't mean the bosses weren't punishing.

Consider fighting a normal high level draugr with an under leveled/geared Kratos. Assume we are on the highest difficulty.

You'll basically have to dodge a lot (or spam ranged attacks), your attacks won't reliably stagger them, you'll tickle their health bar and getting hit once or twice will kill you. That is punishing and hard if there's more than one of them.

However, if your levels are similar you'll be able to count on staggers, there will be certain attacks that cannot be blocked, certain attacks that will stagger you if the block wasn't perfect, you can freeze one of the enemies.

The hard case is far simpler and less involved than the normal combat.

I consider the normal valkyries hard, but individually they don't really have lots of tricks that require hyper focusing both on reading them and executing the appropriate counter. They are fairly simple to understand for the most part.

You need to have cached a butt load of movements and their appropriate counters to fight the queen valkyrie. You might even find some non obvious openings for poking.

Most valkyries are straightforward when you get their 1-3 special attacks. That's not much more than regular enemies.