Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Review

Fittingly for a game where our hero hears multiple voices in her head, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 is confused about who it is, what it wants, and where it's going. Is it an indie game eager to be unique in the marketplace, or another triple-A hit with the usual trimmings? Is it a peaceful puzzle game, or a mini soulslike? Is it an inwardly reflective tale about the demons of trauma, or a very literal tale of gods and monsters? Is it even a game, or is it an interactive art piece?

Even the oddly reversed name of the g🤪ame, where t🦋he subtitle remains constant and gets numbered, while the base title is changed from the last entry, speaks to the confusion that seems to run through every choice made in Hellblade 2.

Hellblade 2 has no heads-up display, no health bars, no directional compass, no map... it's not a stripped back, stylistic, essentials only HUD, there's none at all. To its credit, where many games have tried and failed, it makes exploration intuitive without explicitly telling you where you need to go, hiding a few secrets for those who explore but making its main path fairly instinctive. Unfortunately, all the credit it gets for HUDless exploration, it quickly loses for HUDless combat.

Hellblade's World Is Gorgeous And Violent

There's significantly more combat to the sequel than the original, and it all comes in choreographed scenes where several enemies attack you one after the other. In these scenes, it mixes your actual input with cutscenes as Senua flips enemies over her back, steals their weapons, or drives them into allies. The HUDless nature is supposed to make you feel like you're always playing, even when the cutscene wrestles control away from you. But these exchanges go on for so long that it has the opposite effect - it feels like you're never playing.

While you'll get to block and dodge, landing a few petty hits to fill up a slow-time charm that basically amounts to an instakill, all of the cool moments are taken away from you. While the transition between gameplay and cutscene is visually seamless, the fact you can just stop pushing buttons makes it extremely obvious when the game is playing itself. And for pretty much every significant victory, the game lands the final few blows itself while you watch on uselessly.

This contradiction bleeds through to the runtime too. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:At six to ten hours, it's a short game for a title that walks like a triple-A and quacks like a triple-A. As 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox's big exclusive of the first half of the year, it clocks in at less than a third of the length of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Sony's latest offering, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stellar Blade, which itself is fairly breezy compared tౠo some of the 50-100 hour time sinks on the triple-A scene. And yet, Hellblade feels as though it drags, offering at least four moments that could serve as definitive endpoints.

It feels like we play a tr🌳uncated Hellblade 2 followed by a whistlest🎶op tour of Hellblade 3

The story moves from being fluid and largely interpretive as it was in the first game, with Senua initially travelling alone through caves and mountains searching for some purpose. Yes, there is a plot driving her here, but much like the first game, this often seems to be a journey to find herself as much as whatever it is she is looking for. But suddenly, at the game's first ending, this goal becomes far more concrete, and sets off a chain of specific plot beats introduced far too late and thus dealt with far too quickly.

Some of this is due to the game's widening cast, who feel (at least in part) like they're there because a sequel must have more, bigger, better. But the added voices dilute what Hellblade is about. In the first game, there is a dance of reality occurring. We're never sure if the things Senua sees are entire figments of her imagination conjured by her psychosis or if, rather fantastically, the magic and giants and power of the gods truly are swirling around her. By bringing in several other characters who equally interact with these elements and corroborate most of Senua's visions, it's no longer a poetically polygonal exploration of mental health turmoil, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War with multiple whispering narrators.

As a result of this, the pacing feels off. After wandering through another cave system, we suddenly face what appears to be the final boss. We discover its motivation, Senua connects with it, and the battle is not a brainless exercise in kill kill kill but more of an action-adventure platforming challenge, while the sudden volcanic setting gives it scope. But then, it really is sudden, rushing us toꦦ (what turns out to not be) the end out of nowhere, only for a completely new character to show up for the final few scenes. It feels like we play a truncated Hellblade 2 followed by a whistlestop tour of Hellblade 3.

And yet, like a hopeful whisper in the shadows, there is still good in Hellblade 2. While the puzzles can often be a little rote, relying on 'focusing on an orb' (ie flicking a switch on and off) every time you hit an obstacle, parts of the world feel far more vibrant version of this triple-A busywork. There are faces hidden in rock, which put you in Senua's mindset of questioning everything. But most other puzzles feel like dull padding far too often.

The two most epic sequences in the game manage this balance far better. Dashing between gushing explosions or lava or pulsating thumps of tidal waves, Senua battles the elements to match wits with the gods. These are spectacular exchanges, even if they don't fall as neatly into the story as they should, and showcase what Hellblade should be about. It's unfortunate that too much of combat is a repetitive slog of parry, roll, hit, special move. Most video game combat can be reduced to simple commands, but with Hellblade it really is just those four, the exact same way, one after the other, from start to finish.

Then, as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ninja Theory clearly wants us to, w༺e must discuss the technological marvels of the game. I firmly believe there is a better, worse looking, version of Hellblade 2 that exists out there in the aether, one where the seven year development time is put to better use than making cutting edge grapꦫhics. But I have to admit I sliced my fingers open pushing the buttons here - that cutting edge really cuts.

There are a couple of scenes where Senua sniffles and the camera pans in as we see every sinew of her face twitch with grief, anger, doubt. It's not just that it 'looks like real life', it captures human emotion on a level I have never seen in a video game. It is wondrous what Hellblade 2 does with its lens. But one has to question if the seven years of development time might have been better spent making the players feel emotionally invested rather than proving that the protagonist is.

It feels as though I should dedicate some time to talking about just how special or important or interesting it is for Hellblade to depict psychosis, but that's part of the issue - it just feels as though we should. The sequel does less interesting things with it than the original, and stays largely in its shell, with growth instead spent on combat and helping it hang with the triple-A crowd instead of embracing its true nature as an odd little indie about something weird and wonderful.

It's easy to focus on Hellblade 2's flaws because they are so surface level. Combat is repetitive and made an unnecessary focal point. The extra characters dilute instead of adding. I'm still not sure what Hellblade thinks it is, or wants to be. But deeper than that, there is some quality worth rooting for - an interesting protagonist powered by a brilliant performance, ingenious use of the environment for exploration and puzzles, a true electric miracle of motion capture unfolding before our eyes. The temptation is to look at this, at the victories Ninja Theory finds as it flounders to keep pace with the biggest hitters, and wonder what the team could do with a lot more money behind it. But when you consider it keeps getting tangled up in its own triple-A Halloween costume, maybe the question is to wonder what magic it could work with less.