Hellblade II: Senua’s Saga

It's a movie pretending to be a game, and about 80% of it is a dragged out walking simulator. If all that walking would have built up to some intense combat set pieces, maybe it would have been worth it, but the combat is just dreadful. When you're in a fight, you just want it to be over already. All the fights are similar, repetitive, and dragged out, and it's 100% on rails unlike the original which was, let's say, 50% on rails. You never even fight multiple enemies at once (which you did in the original), it's just one at a time, for like ten times each fight. The combat is done in a way to be extremely cinematic, which is cool for exactly one time, but loses its charm immediately after that when you realize it is essentially a quick time event. Sadly, this is not real gameplay, and it's not a real game. If it was a bad game but had a great story, I would forgive the dragged out time wasting combat and walking simulator moments. Unfortunately, the story isn't great. The narrative is somehow both extremely ambiguous and puddle deep at the same time, like the writers were trying to be mysterious but couldn't bother to actually do the work with consistent world-building. In the first game, this could be excused by believing Senua was sychzophrenic and everything happened in her head, but in this game she literally interacts with other characters who share her experience and the game does not for once challenge whether the events taking place are real or not. So the ambiguity in what the hell is going on is just bad writing. What's worse, the mystery surrounding the giants is written off so sloppily in the climax that I doubt even the writers understand what they were going for. It's completely inconsistent with previous sections of the game, as if the writers just decided to end it all of a sudden. And it's not just the overall narrative that's bad. The voices in your head, which were unique and interesting in Hellblade 1, are frequently awful here as they are just spoon-feeding you information that is obvious, to the point that they are just tedious. It just feels like 7 hours I will never get back in my life. It's a shame because I genuinely loved the original, despite its flaws. But hey, the graphics are nice!

Alright. [i]Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II[/i] is done and dusted. You know, I didn't particularly enjoy the first game, but in looking at this one and watching some of the trailers, I felt like it might provide a different experience for me, and as fate would have it, that ended up being the case. Or maybe I'm just in a different place in my life and what I enjoy. Dunno. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3739462440 I think the thing to know going in is that this game is intense. The representation of psychosis seems pretty spot on from what I can tell and have been told by people who know more about this than I. It definitely is a prominent feature of the game that is at times uplifting but mostly dark and creepy. The doubt and fears Senua experiences are represented by the voices in her head. I think something this game does a good job of is blurring the lines between Senua's external reality and the reality she experiences internally via these voices. As a result, you could make arguments for everything being simply things she imagines. However, I prefer to keep things simple and take them as they are presented. The hallucinations seem pretty obvious and in an interesting twist, she does meet someone who recognizes what Senua is going through. Which causes the voices in her head to believe that he can hear them. Can he actually hear them? Probably not. But I think he recognizes the internal turmoil and conflict within Senua, and that's probably enough to be valuable to Senua and her path to be seen as a person rather than a burden and a curse. So, I prefer to take the bulk of the story as events actually happening, with interludes where Senua fights the demons in her head and struggles to hear her true voice amongst the many vying for her attention in her head. This is a world where myth and legend take form and walk the Earth, often to the detriment of the human communities living here. And while part of this journey is internal for Senua, her goal in this game remains the same externally throughout, which is to end the enslavement of her people at the hands of the Northmen. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3739462463 To that end, she and her companions as she encounters them, will fight to free the communities they visit from the monsters that shackle them. This is represented by quite a few puzzle sequences where Senua will find a way to overcome these challenges to progress her quest and the story. None of them were particularly difficult, but some of the solutions were hidden behind clever design choices. There is also combat of course, and this is handled via standard light/heavy attacks and requisite parrying and bolstered by the power of the sun via a special mirror she possesses. I thought the writing as it pertains to character development in general was quite good and I also enjoyed the personal struggles both Senua and her companions had to overcome. The overarching storyline was also pretty good, although the final act was a bit confusing as it kind of leaves it up to you as to whether or not you really think any of this happened or not. Like I say though, I prefer to keep things simple, and I like the idea that it did happen. Mostly. :) The graphics are of course stunning. This is a bleak world with hints of natural beauty, but the representation of everything is visceral and evocative. This is a world that can, and in some part, does actually exist. It's a real treat (or torture) to visit these various locations. The star of the show is the voice acting, however. It's a masterclass in getting the most out of the actors, who were all believable and really brought life to the characters. Thórgestr was inarguably my favorite character and showed the most growth, but man did everyone do a fantastic job. The soundtrack and sounds of battle were also especially good. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3739309273 Where this game struggled was with optimization. It's not the worst I've seen, but this game did both lag and outright crash with some frequency during certain sections of the game. Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is on sale at the time of this writing, and it 100% earns that price. As long as you know that you're getting a very dark and often tragic story with some very graphic imagery and sounds as it pertains to death and loss, you're getting a game that respects your time and is well worth a look. [code]If you found this review helpful and would be interested in supporting my Curator group, [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32549618/]Robilar's Reviews[/url], it would be appreciated. Cheers.[/code]

Hellblade 1 is a haunting and startlingly compassionate tale of life with a mental illness in cruel times, and of how the worst of it comes from people (often, well-meaning people!) around you. Hellblade 2 is a vikingcore fantasy lever-puzzle game with elements of jumpscare horror that reads like it was written by AI that someone had fed Hellblade 1 to. the Furies are now just mindlessly repeating the same words one after another, instead of narrating Senua's life and reminiscing about her past in areas that bring up her memories. they are no longer useful as a combat HUD, and instead became loadscreen tips. they went from cheering her on and tearing her down in equal measure, and escalating with how scared they sound with every next area that puts Senua herself under greater stress than the last one, to just a multitude of chatty narrators. the sense that Senua is an experienced, capable warrior is completely gone: every fight is now ONLY a series of 1v1 duels, she goes to the ground between enemies, she forgot how to punch (attack options are now fast/heavy, not fast/heavy/melee): contrast the time in 1 just before she goes into the water, when I was keeping two enemies in front of me, then a fury barked "behind you!" and I slammed the block key on a reflex, then watched Senua flawlessly parry a strike from a third that I hadn't realized had spawned in the first place. you're never going to get that in 2, and she's supposed to be older, more confident, and more experienced now. I'm watching the girl who once upon a time charged at something like fifty times her size while screaming "I have a sword here that can kill a god" and she is eating ♥♥♥♥ while the mooks politely queue up for her to be slaughtered. I keep having a persistent, underlying feeling, through the whole of Hellblade 2, that it tries to be clever about "aha! this part was real! gotcha! this part was not!" and sometimes it can't decide whether the suffering of outcasts and lonely desperates is a human thing, or a metaphysical cataclysm, like it expects brownie points for being 'clever' about this ambiguity. the sense of "the question of 'so was it real' comes with an in-built flaw, because ALL of it is real to her; this is how she has to live" has been completely obliterated. this feeling only compounds with the "congrats you beat the game!" reward becoming Now A Side Character Is A Fury. this betrays a complete lack of interest in and understanding of who and what the Furies ARE, from whoever's bright idea it was to write that in. in Hellblade 1, ALL of the greater challenges were built from things Senua was afraid of. in Valravn, she fights her fear of the dark and of being alone and helpless in it. in Surt, she fights her fear of fire, after what happened when she was five years old. in the dark rot, she fights her fear of the plague that took so many of her village neighbours, and the things she was told about being "cursed", that's where the meta-timer comes from. in the Beast, she faces more of the things she was told, and the person who said those things to her and that she then internalized to become the Shadow's voice. in Hela, she fights her inability to let go, and her need to do something when there is nothing left to be done. now she's in Iceland, zombies are real, and jotnar are either real or a metaphor for the consequences of hurting people. both the zombies and the jotnar are physical threats that everyone around her can also see and fight against. also, the fae or something are real, for some godforsaken reason. there is nothing in this game I liked better. some things are okay. I counted exactly three occurences when the Furies felt like they used to. ("you need him alive!" / "I don't want to go in the darkness again :/" / "changed? changed how? what does that mean." -> aloud "changed how?") they gave her a coat! she's still very kind! the game is a massive disappointment, even at half-price, but it was impossible to expect a good game after Microsoft bought out the studio. art dies at the hands of corporate cash grabs again. The best part of this game is the soundtrack. I'm glad they hired Heilung and STFUR for it.

Somehow a lesser game than its predecessor in every possible way. Senua barely feels connected to this story. The third chapter, which constitutes the biggest chunk of the game, sees you in a near endless succession of repetitive puzzle/combat scenarios that lead nowhere. I stopped playing to do something else twice during this sequence, because it was that boring. I don't mind purely narrative experiences. I genuinely love the first game, but everything here is scaled back to focus purely on visuals, yet the majority of this game is just an empty rock field and caves. None of the imagination or creative choices from this team are on display here at all. I'd call this a poorly paced narrative, but there would have to be a narrative to speak of. The idea that there are real monsters forcing Senua to grapple even more with what's real or not is an enticing hook, but completely unexplored in any meaningful way.

一般我都习惯玩完游戏再评价，尽量做到全面。但这个游戏玩到第二章不想玩了，两章足够见微知著，不想委屈自己了。 目前为止遇到的男角色5个、男小怪17个。女角色/女声，加上主角一共4个，其中一个还是一见面就被男虜隶主杀死的女虜隶。相较男小怪，主角体型小、瘦，还留长发。 主角有男性缘，开篇背景故事介绍主角因和男恋爱感受到救赎，男友死后主角很痛苦，被牠的死所驱动踏上复仇之路。游玩过程中也一直念叨此男，主线故事恐怕会和这个男的强绑定。 ”阴影“男声既傲慢又神神叨叨，一直跟在身边更是烦得要死，和地平线零之曙光的赛伦斯一样老登。精神世界的第三人称碎碎念旁白感觉也挺尴尬的。 文本和翻译男本位、有忤女词：英雄、他妈的。 游玩及实战时没有技能、按键教学，就开头放个按键表让玩家看一眼自己对照，破坏沉浸感。战斗教学不清不楚的，手感也差。 第一章遇到一个男虜隶主怪，即使开简化模式了，还是会被对面多次打倒、戏耍，非常不爽！最后主角打赢了还下不去手杀死对面，让牠带路。一边听对面放狠话、一边心里后悔不杀牠。真的醉了，如此憋屈。

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is a game that is difficult to judge by normal action-adventure standards. It is not trying to be a big open-world game, a deep combat system, or a long RPG. Instead, it is a dark, cinematic and psychological journey where atmosphere, sound, visuals and emotion are more important than traditional gameplay depth. The first thing that stands out is the presentation. Hellblade II looks incredible. The environments are detailed, realistic and oppressive. Every location feels cold, dirty, dangerous and alive. The game uses lighting, weather, facial animation and camera work extremely well. It often feels less like a game scene and more like a high-budget film that you are slowly moving through. The world is beautiful, but not in a comfortable way. It feels harsh, violent and heavy, which fits Senua’s story perfectly. The sound design is one of the best parts of the whole experience. This is a game that should absolutely be played with headphones. The voices around Senua are not just background noise; they are part of the storytelling and part of the gameplay atmosphere. They create tension, confusion, fear and sometimes even a strange sense of support. The audio makes the player feel closer to Senua’s mental state, and it gives the game a very unique identity. The story is serious, emotional and disturbing. Senua is still a powerful main character because her struggle feels personal. The game focuses on trauma, fear, belief, violence and survival. It does not treat these themes lightly. The tone is dark from beginning to end, and the game clearly wants the player to feel uncomfortable rather than simply entertained. For players who enjoy psychological storytelling, this is one of the strongest parts of Hellblade II. However, the game also has clear weaknesses. The biggest problem is that it gives the player very little freedom. Most of the time, you are walking forward through a carefully directed path. Exploration is minimal, and the game rarely lets you step away from its main route. This helps the cinematic feeling, but it also makes the experience feel restricted. Some players will love the focus, while others may feel like they are watching the game more than playing it. Combat is visually impressive, but mechanically simple. Fights look brutal and intense. Every strike, dodge and parry has weight, and the close camera makes battles feel personal. But after a while, the combat becomes predictable. There are not many options, enemy variety is limited, and the system does not develop much over the course of the game. It is exciting to look at, but not especially deep to master. The puzzles are also not very challenging. They usually fit the atmosphere and visual style, but they can feel slow and repetitive. Many of them are based on observing the environment or finding patterns. These sections can be beautiful, but they rarely feel difficult or clever. They mostly exist to support the mood rather than to test the player. Pacing is another issue. Hellblade II is intentionally slow. This works well for building tension and atmosphere, but it can also become tiring. There are many moments where the game forces the player to move slowly, listen, watch and absorb the scene. If you enjoy immersive storytelling, this can be powerful. If you prefer active gameplay, it may feel frustrating. The length may also disappoint some players. The game is not very long, and there is limited reason to replay it unless you want to experience the story and atmosphere again. There are no major choices, no deep progression system and no large amount of side content. It is a focused experience, but that also means the amount of actual gameplay content is limited. Still, Hellblade II succeeds at what it wants to be. It is not trying to please everyone. It is a very specific type of game: cinematic, emotional, dark and highly atmospheric. Its best moments are genuinely memorable. The visuals, sound and acting create an experience that feels intense and personal. Few games are able to create this level of psychological pressure and visual realism. At the same time, it is important to be honest: as a traditional game, it is not very deep. The combat is simple, the puzzles are basic, and player control is limited. Hellblade II is strongest as an artistic and emotional experience, not as a complex action game. + Pros Amazing graphics and realistic environments Excellent sound design, especially with headphones Strong atmosphere from beginning to end Emotional and mature story Powerful main character performance Cinematic combat that feels intense No unnecessary filler Unique psychological style - Cons Very linear Limited exploration Combat looks better than it plays Simple puzzles Slow pacing may not suit everyone Short length Low replay value More cinematic than interactive Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II is a beautiful, disturbing and emotionally heavy experience. It is not a game for everyone. Players looking for deep combat, freedom, long progression or open-world content may be disappointed. But if you enjoy cinematic storytelling, dark atmosphere, psychological themes and outstanding audiovisual design, this game is absolutely worth playing. It is not perfect as a game, but it is extremely strong as an experience. Final Score: 84/100

Quite possibly the most unnecessary sequel to what I consider one of the most perfect games. The visuals have become more realistic than ever, the vocal and motion performances are still as outstanding and music still elevates every fight and breathtaking sprint through a madness inducing setting. So what gives? The combat actually got way worse. While it has become quite a bit more cinematic and diegetic, since the game takes away your control all the time it's difficult to tell whether something has happened because you did something or it's just a very integrated cutscene. There is a very real disconnect from the inputs and it will lead to your death. A lot. Exploration is a chore. There is about the same amount of things to find and discover in the nooks and crannies of the setpieces, but with the run speed being slowed, any time you are not walking in a straight path to your destination feels like a punishment. Sure, I could go off and find a collectible by walking to this side, but what if I don't find anything? That's five seconds of backtracking that feel weirdly like an eternity. With all the visual fidelity the only environments you really encounter are a variation on dark cave or generic Icelandic landscape. There is very little to catch your eyes on. The massive mountains and eruption plumes are impressive, but melt into the background and landmarks fail to provide you any sense of progression. Not that there is any progression. The narrative fails to define any real goals and as such Senua doesn't really experience any real growth. The only points the game actually makes have already been made in the previous game, but it doesn't feel clever enough to be cyclical in a postmodernist sense. The puzzles are actually exactly the same. Instead of gateways it's braziers, but they do exactly the same thing to the environment. There are fewer of them, replaced by more walking. The voices in your head do not break out into a panicked crescendo interrupting each other and dragging you deeper into Senua's condition to the point of making you question if it is you or your character hearing them. They now patiently wait for their turn or a convenient trigger. That's not mental illness, that's just superfluous narration. It's difficult to imagine what could make a deserving followup after playing the first game and it is quite possible that this one is the best case scenario. But if it is, maybe there should have been just the one game. Microsoft is the worst thing to have happened to Ninja Theory.

Кусок неоптимізованого калу. Наймразотніший слоп з усіх Анріал слопів. Сюжет - ні про що. Рівні - один суцільний коридор. Геймплей - затиснута кнопка "вперед". Клянусь, більшу половину часу, витраченого на гру, я просто плентався за різними персонажами, вислуховуючи їхні безкінечні монологи. А ще пригадую момент, коли Сенуї потрібно було проповзти 2 метри по вузькій ущелині. Вона стогнала добрих 3 хвилини, продираючись крізь каміння, а я весь цей час сидів, як ідіот, і тиснув "вперед"... В житті так весело не було! Ага. Вищеописаний маразм періодично розбавляли небагаточисельні загадки і бої. Отут мушу віддати Hellblade II належне. Бойова система хоч і проста (удар, блок, ухилення), але чорт забирай, яка ж вона видовищна! Поєдинки на мечах захоплюють дух і максимально погружають у хаос битви! Ну, в ті рідкісні моменти, коли фпс не падає нижче нуля. А ще у грі лише один бос... Загалом, даунгрейд після першої частини просто колосальний. Сенуя скотилася із чудової пригоди в симулятор ходьби, якому потрібна топова відяха, щоб відрендерити кусок землі і дві халупи. Я майже ніколи не пишу негативні огляди, але проходити Hellblade II було боляче фізично. Просто шмат лaйнa. Це все, що я можу сказати.

С одной стороны, это одна из самых красивых игр, в которые я вообще играл. Иногда ловил себя на мысли, что смотрю не игру, а какой то дорогой фильм. Детализация лиц, анимации, пейзажи Исландии - всё выглядит просто невероятно История продолжает путь Сенуа, которая борется не только с внешними врагами, но и со своими внутренними демонами. Атмосфера здесь по прежнему главная звезда. Голоса в голове постоянно что-то шепчут, комментируют происходящее, сбивают с толку или наоборот помогают. В наушниках это работает просто отлично и местами реально заставляет чувствовать себя неуютно Но если говорить про геймплей, тут уже есть вопросы. Бои стали зрелищнее и выглядят очень кинематографично, но по сути остаются довольно простыми. Противников немного, механик тоже. Пазлы практически такие же, как в первой части. Найти символы, внимательно осмотреть на окружение, двигаемся дальше. Иногда это работает на атмосферу, но временами начинает повторяться Самое сильное во второй части это эмоции и подача. Игра постоянно пытается погрузить игрока в состояние Сенуа, показать её страхи, сомнения и переживания. В некоторых сценах это получается настолько хорошо, что забываешь про сам игровой процесс При этом всем понимаешь, что это не экшен в привычном смысле и не РПГ. Здесь нет прокачки, открытого мира или большого разнообразия механик. Это скорее интерактивное приключение на 6–8 часов, которое делает ставку на историю, визуал и атмосферу После прохождения у меня осталось ощущение, что Hellblade 2 - это скорее художественное произведение, чем игра в классическом понимании. Она не пытается развлечь каждую минуту, зато умеет впечатлять и оставлять после себя эмоции. Не идеальное продолжение, но очень сильное атмосферное приключение, которое точно стоит пройти хотя бы ради визуала, звука и истории Сенуа 8.5/10