izigame.me

I only aim write reviews on games I feel strongly about and this one is going to hurt to write. The original Hellblade is one of my favourite games because of how unique it was and I was just as excited as many others were when Hellblade II was announced. But what we were given after all this waiting is an experience that really makes me question what all that development time was for. Minor spoilers warning.

There's no denying that Hellblade II's greatest strengths are visuals and audio, elevated to a standard that challenges the largest AAA-type games. The attention to detail in the environments, character modelling and animation, visual effects and lighting all rendered so fluidly with no obvious loading is an engineering marvel. The sound is equally as masterful, pushing the limits of binaural audio to not only represent the numerous voices that Senua hears but the chaotic nature of her visions and the sounds they create. The soundscape of Hellblade II expands on the original game very well and is some of my favourite bits of sound design in recent years. Heilung being part of the game's soundtrack speaks for itself as to how good their work is.

However, as has been so often the case with recent titles, top tier presentation is simply not enough. As far as being an actual game is concerned, Hellblade II is a drastic step backwards from the original, limiting the input the player has even more than before while also not being any longer or expansive in terms of length

The original Hellblade's combat was surprisingly robust despite the heavy narrative focus. A mixture of attacks that could be chained into specific moves with certain properties, with a slow-mo, directional dodge, and juggling multiple enemies at once. Senua's Furies even became a part of the fights, calling out suggestions to evade or strike back so they felt like part of the game experience. If anything, the only improvements the system needed was an expanded move set and more enemy variety.

Instead, Hellblade II has drastically simplified the combat in both complexity and difficulty for reasons I cannot fathom. The same basic control scheme is still here, but the new animations make each input incredibly sluggish whether acting offensively or defensively. Each battle being restricted to one-on-one duels one after another also feels less impactful, being less like a traditional action game having to switch targets and more of an attempt to make the game "cinematic". All this ends up making the combat simultaneously less engaging and far too easy. You wait for an attack, block enough times to build up Focus, then engage said Focus to kill with a single string of heavy attacks. This worked on every single enemy in the game. The only time I actually had a "game over" was during the final (and only) boss, and any other fight gave me so many second chances to keep going when I messed up that I didn't even realise there could be a game over until then.

The rest of the game, while also like the original mechanically, is incredibly limiting in regards to player engagement. Almost half of this game's runtime is literally holding W and pressing a button to climb a ledge, all on extremely linear paths with a very little amount of deviation. Even when you can spot other ledges and paths that Senua looks like she could traverse and explore, most are impassable or blocked by invisible walls, meaning the experience feels railroaded to a degree the original Hellblade never was. This is made worse by the puzzles. While visually engaging at manipulating the environment, they are just as simple to solve as the first game and never difficult to work out, yet are even fewer in number than before. This makes a game that, outside of combat, is a really slow slog to get through.

This wouldn't be a problem if the story was just as memorable as the original. The first Hellblade being about Senua working through her psychosis on a personal quest, blurring the line between what was real and what was not, was engaging for that reason. Hellblade II's story is no longer about Senua's internal struggles, but more about how she interacts with the world. While a good idea to progress Senua's character following the conclusion of the first game, this change in emphasis is ultimately for the worse.

The Furies were both a plot point and a part of the game experience in the original Hellblade. Senua's isolation with her voices made them the secondary characters, feeling more intimate since no-one else was physically around to be with her. As a result, the Furies and their whisperings were more haunting and disturbing, even when they were being "nice" to Senua, and their cries of what action to take during fights or puzzles made them feel like part of Senua herself in those situations. Both thematically and as a game function, they worked.

In Hellblade II, the Furies now spend almost all of their dialogue literally explaining obvious things like exposition dumps. Nearly all of their dialogue is telling the player, not Senua, what a certain person is feeling or saying at any given moment in the story (including Senua herself), as if to make it absolutely crystal clear you understand what's going on. They don't feel like a part of Senua anymore and instead a way for the developers to smack all of the subtlety out of the narrative so you don't miss what they're trying to tell you. At the same time, they're less involved in the gameplay by speaking much more generic repeated lines in fights and puzzle solving rather than anything specific.

This a symptom of the story lacking the emotional impact of the first game because it's no longer as personal. With Senua meeting a cast of real humans and taking on a journey that's not for her own sake, the personal aspect of inhabiting her mind becomes more of a backdrop that doesn't get the attention such a concept deserves (and indeed had in the first Hellblade). Said secondary characters, while acted and presented well, also seem to only be around to prop up how "special" Senua is, an aspect of the writing that grows razor thin by the game's end.

The ending of the game itself is also a big cop out. It tries to pull the same "reveal" as the first by implying that some of the events weren't all real (despite being witnessed by other people), yet doesn't really offer an actual conclusion to say so either way. Even if dealing with blurred lines of reality and imagination, the original Hellblade had a definite ending. Hellblade II spends time building up to an ending and then ultimately doesn't give one. This might be better explained with other narrators post-completion or the secret lorestones, but the game was such a trudge that I have no incentive to go back and check, even with the short runtime of 6-7 hours.

Hellblade II ultimately feels like a tech demo then a fully fledged game. Even if its visuals can dazzle and the sound design and music is worthy of awards from how well realised it is, it ends up being even less of an interactive experience than the original and makes me wonder if the long development time was purely spent on superficial aspects of making the game look pretty. There are some things to enjoy here, but Hellblade II is deeply disappointing as a follow up to one of gaming's most unique original experiences. Almost every place where this game could have improved on its predecessor as an actual game, it didn't. And in some cases, it did it worse. That's a real damn shame.