God of War Ragnarök has been a divisive release, though heavily weighted in the camp of awesome, and today news of another reason to jump in the Nine Realms with Kratos and Arteus comes by way of the addition of Photo Mode for the game. And it's feature-packed.

Chief among those features is the ability to have all subjects in an image pull a facial expression, provided those subjects are Kratos, Atreus, Freya, Brok, Sindri, Tyr, Angrboda, Thor and Thrúd.

Here's the full breakdown of what to expect with the update:

God of War Ragnarök – Photo Mode Features

• Apply expressions to the following characters in a scene:
  • Kratos, Atreus, Freya, Brok, Sindri, Tyr, Angrboda, Thor, and Thrúd
    
  • Hide main or side characters in a scene
    
  • Adjust camera controls with:
    • Field of View
      
    • Focal Length
      
    • Camera Roll
  • Adjust shutter controls with:
    • Depth of Field
      
    • Focus Distance
      
    • F-Stop
  • Adjust brightness and filters with:
    • Film Grain
      
    • Exposure
      
    • Filter Intensity, with finer controls for Vibrance and Saturation
  • Apply vignettes, borders, and logos

In addition to the info above, QA lead for the game, Time Ward (also the name of an amazing Aussie skater from back in the day), had these tips to share for potential photogs stepping out into the Nine Realms:

Photo Mode Tips

• Adjust the Filter Intensity, Vibrance, and Saturation on your desired filter for a wider range of colours.
  
• Be sure to add a vignette when appropriate to give your shot more depth.
  
• Don’t be afraid to roll the camera a little bit, especially when shooting combat. It can make your screenshots feel more dynamic and less like the camera is always shooting from a fixed horizontal position.
  
• If you like to take vertical shots, you can roll the camera 90 degrees to give yourself the much-needed headroom.
  
• Remember, lighting is everything! Your screenshots will really pop if the subject of your shot is properly lit. Know where your light source is when entering Photo Mode to give your subject proper visibility.
  
• Take your time looking for a shot you’re happy with. A lot of times, you can enter photo mode thinking of taking a specific shot only to find something else better during that moment. Explore with the camera and move about the scene and see what jumps out at you.

In our review of God of War Ragnarök we wrote that "it’s as good as most of the other top games released this year" awarding the game a score of 9/10.

It's been a long time coming, and while we got to tease you with an initial hands-on, we can finally lift the lid on the full God of War Ragnarök experience by way of this in-depth review. The question of whether this tops the brilliant God of War (2018) is on everyone’s lips, and it’s one we broach with gusto.

Here’s a snippet:

In fact, one of the aspects we bemoaned with God of War was in its lack of life, and while we addressed this a little in our hands-on it wouldn’t be spoilerish to reveal that you’ll come across a lot more friendlies in God of War Ragnarök, which is actually really cool, and some will give you side-quests (or Favours) to perform, but once they’re done with you they just blend back into the background, which is kind of fine given the sort of game we’re playing, but we can’t help but feel this could have been a larger part of Ragnarök being a bit more evolutionary in how it went about things. But as far as serving a larger part in helping with game-world exposition, new characters to actually interact with is still very cool.

Lore entries come in thick and fast in addition to the above and are written as a mix of Mimir and Kratos, with notes from Atreus thrown in for teen angsty measure. And it’s all very good, though not incredibly in-depth (which I’d personally have preferred). Moreover, the game’s map is almost a like-for-like from the 2018 outing, which helps highlight something you might have already seen or heard mentioned from others who’ve had early access like us, and we’ve alluded to it a bit, but Ragnarök is familiar all-round…

Click here for our full God of War Ragnarök review.

Ahead of being able to talk in full about God of War Ragnarök with our review, we were given the go ahead to publish impressions from the first few hours of the game, which takes place in Midgard and Svartalfheim. There’s a lot omitted from our experience with the game, and we proactively tried to stay as spoiler-free as possible, but what we have relayed is what the game feels like to play and what sort of cadence you can expect, among other things.

Here’s a snippet:

It’s in Svartalfheim that the mirror to the first game gets put away and instead what we’re given is something akin to the first game’s Lake of the Nine, in smaller (heh) form. There are quests galore in here, and brilliantly designed pockets of the world full of environmental and traversal puzzles, backed by challenging combat and a steady release of varying enemy types. In God of War Ragnarök there are five difficulty options that start at Story, then go on to Grace, Balance and No Mercy before capping off at Give Me God of War. I chose the latter as I Platinum’d God of War and consider myself a fairly good hand at it, and will say that early on things felt pretty dang easy. Almost too easy. However, about two thirds into the Svartalfheim jaunt I started to think I’d been trolled a bit by the studio as the steep jump in challenge had me on the back foot, but it was also at about this point that I started to look more deeply at the available RPG systems, realising I had a handy Sindri available to juice me up with the best gear and upgrades available to this point.

Click here for our God of War Ragnarök hands-on.