Senua's Saga: Hellblade II Review (Solthias)
The follow up to Senua's Sacrifice is in itself a great game. Visually stunning, masterfully acted and a story befitting of our wonderful Senua. If you liked the first one I'm sure you'll like this, however I found this a bit more difficult to play through than her first story.
The majority of the story is a struggle for Senua. She struggles through her past, her voices, and the weight of her journey. I appreciate the story, but after literally going to Hel and back, I thought maybe our Senua could be filled with strength and determination more than what she showed through the game. Her journey has purpose and she has many followers, but even with supports that could lift her up she still seems to flail about in her own head. I completely understand why she would go through this journey barraged with self doubt and her voices tormenting her, but still, our hero is deteriorating and there's nothing we can do about it!
Which leads to the next point. The whole game plays out as a storybook and Senua is bound to her fate of deteriorating through her journey. There's not even choices like you'd play in a David Cage game, or much to interact with like in those games like ''hey that's my Nietzsche book! I read it every night! Don't you think I'm smart????". You're just going to play out the story. And that's okay because it's a good story, but expect a very straight path to get to where you're going.
The combat is challenging and fun, but sometimes it just doesn't seem to register my dodging or blocks, adding to the struggle of the game. Ofcourse I don't see Senua as morphing into a master of dodging and parrying like Iron Pineapple, and I expect to be hit sometimes, but damn there were some times I was getting my ass handed to me and it made combat feel unintuitive and annoying.
The puzzles for the most part are okay. But there were some where you feel these are just tedious gameplay stretchers. Take a ball and place it in the pedestal. Great. Do that again, but with more pathways. Ok? Do that again, but the pathways change when you look at a ball in the sky, and then you're going to need to keep changing the pathways back and forth THEN put a ball into a pedestal!!! Fuck alright. The environments are beautiful, everything looks great as you're solving a puzzle of moving pieces, but come on, these puzzles are trivial. I would prefer more effort into just making these parts of the game into one interesting giant interaction rather than this...
Overall, worth it / 10