Before the weight of the PC gaming community comes crashing down on our heads, hear us out.

The PC port of 2018’s God of War releases today at 18:00 local time. We’ve been playing the game early thanks to code from Sony Interactive Entertainment and so far, things are fantastic. Barring one crash thanks to outdated drivers, the game is running incredibly well at Ultra settings with AMD Fidelity FX set to Ultra Quality.

We’ll dive more into performance in our review next week but for now we wanted to offer up a piece of advice – play this game with a controller.

While God of War for PC offers the ability to customise controls to your liking, we’ve found that the fast pace of the action in the game – especially at higher difficulties – can make movement, combat and aiming rather cumbersome when using a keyboard and mouse.

We don’t believe this is a problem with the port but more of an artefact of God of War’s design for the PlayStation. Compared to a controller, you will be taking your hands off of controls far more often and this can lead to frustration.

During the first fight with the a boss in the opening moments of the game. We threw the Leviathan Axe, ordered Atreus to attack the boss and recalled our Axe. The final two actions forced us to take our fingers off of the movement buttons in order to execute those actions.

Needless to say, we failed that encounter.

Upon switching to our Dualshock 4 controller however, the flow of combat felt better. We were able to dodge attacks while ordering Atreus to fire his arrows and it all just felt right.

Beyond that, part of the magic of the Leviathan Axe is the heavy thud it makes when it returns to Kratos’ hand. This thud is backed up by vibration via a controller which offers the functionality and it really adds to the joy of this game.

If you don’t have a controller on hand, then we recommend spending a good few minutes customising the keyboard and mouse keys to your liking before diving into Give Me God of War difficulty.

This is especially important once you pass the mid-point of the game. We won’t spoil anything but once you pass that point you are going to need to be able to act quickly in combat.

You can absolutely play God of War on PC with your keyboard and mouse but you will have a more enjoyable time if you’re using a controller. What’s more is that you can use any controller supported by Steam, even an Xbox controller.

God of War PC is available today on both Steam and the Epic Games Store at a price of R599.