Usually, when i play a game for the first hour-hour and 30 minutes, i get a general consensus as to what my experience with the game will be for the rest of the playthrough.

For a game like this, i'd like to use the example of God Of War 2018.
It started off slow, walking for a while, lots of cinematic presentation going on for roughly 10 minutes.
Then the central gameplay started and it was fun and intense, continuing to the first sets of enemies and the first tutorial boss.

Then it transitioned into walking for abit, a cutscene, and after about 10 minutes i i was starting to think "perhaps this game will just be cutscenes and small gameplay segments unrelated to each other" until the real first boss appeared, testing everything i learned up until that point and pushing away that mindset i had beforehand.

An hour in and i have gotten a consensus that this game will be just as entertaining if not more for the rest of the playthrough after this.

The reason im describing my experience with GOW 2018 is to relate it to my experience with Hellblade 2.

See, while GOW's first hour had intense fights, emotional cutscenes and an incredible boss fight to cap it off, Hellblade 2 tries to do that, but fails in so many ways.

First the walking aspect i mentioned beforehand, while abit of a nuisance in GOW, is showcased to its fullest effect in Hellblade 2 to an absolutely embarrassing amount.
The first 35 minutes were watching a cinematic, walking, watching cutscene, walking, hearing voices and walking.
It's as if the developers misunderstood why the walking in GOW worked, because it was offset by gameplay that interacted with the player, which brings me to my next point.

The gameplay itself is the most bare bones, safe, and easy "gameplay" system i've ever interacted with, to the point i can safely say the game plays itself.
You fight a single enemy at a time, the enemies themselves swing their swords which apparently weigh 30kg so slowly that i could quite literally walk BACKWARDS and the enemy could not hit me.
When you hit the enemy, and i was playing on the hardest difficulty mind you, 3 FULL TIMES you win, it doesnt matter which enemy you do it on unless there's a fucking bear i could've fought later on.

Thats not all by the way, you also have a parry, the window of that parry is so enormously large that i ACCIDENTALLY did it while figuring out the controls. Doesn't help that parrying allows you to hit the enemy 3 times again to end the fight before it even had a chance to start.

After all that, after all that walking and voice talking and boring bland cutscenes held up only by incredible performances, i atleast expected the first boss fight to give me some kind of challenge.

You can't imagine my disappointment when i realized "oh they really didn't try".
Parry, hit 3 times, cutscene, parry/dodge the slowest attack known to man, hit 3 times, cutscene, ending with parry, hit 3 times, cutscene, win.

This and Starfield are the biggest disappointments of the year for me, 2 games that i expected so much more from brought down to simplistic games lacking any kind of imagination, with bare bones gameplay and design lacking more depth than a fucking playstation 1 game.

I feel sorry for Ninja Theory, because i've been playing Heavenly Sword recently and while it has some problems, it showed me that Ninja Theory can somehow make a good game with decent gameplay,
and i'm sad that this game might be the reason for Microsoft shutting them down in the near future, like how they shut down Arkane and Tango Gameworks.

And even with that impending closure to another studio held by a greedy and uncaring company, i cannot recommend nor will i ever plan to replay Hellblade 2.

The most unnecessary remaster of all time.
Half of the "improvements" are just ray-tracing and while i like the fact that its on pc, it requires needlessly high specs for little reward other than fancier textures and smoother gameplay.
I don't really care about peter's face change as i know I'm going to spend nearly 90% of the game with him behind a mask, but it does feel a little bit sudden and out of the blue to just abandon the original face model and switch to a new one with arguably little to no next gen improvements or additions.

Just more proof that Sony will remaster, remake and re-release literally every game in their catalogue except for the ones that actually need a remake/remaster/re-release or BLOODBORNE SONY.

Gameplay is an improvement from 0 but goddamn whoever thought the majima everywhere system was a good idea AND having it tie to your dragon style progression needs to be slapped and fired from the company.

The worst thing about this is that Sega and RGG just act like this is the definitive way to experience the first game in the franchise which is simply not true.

Couple that with lack of details from the original and being a yakuza 0 asset flip and you have yourself one of the laziest remakes i've ever played.

Just localize the HD collection and put it on new consoles and don't act like it doesn't exist, SEGA.

Could never shake off the constant reminder that Spider-Man literally let the police spy on people lol.

Probably the best game in the small trilogy and the best spiderman game out there.

Black cat's hot too.

As an adaptation of the original FOTNS it could've been alot worse than what we got.

The story itself is a half assed adaptation of the original story, including a bunch of original characters that aren't really that memorable.

However, the gameplay makes up for most of it:
The combat is fantastic and feels exactly how i imagine a FOTNS game should play like, the bosses are some of the best in the series, and the qtes with kenshiro doing his 100 fist rush attack are always incredible.

The Mad Max type driving is pretty surprising considering it has never been present in an RGG game before(apart from 5 but that was racing and driving a taxi), its responsive, intense and fits with the series.

The ost is abit forgettable apart from some of the bosses themes and this game's rendition of Receive You and bafflingly no Ai Wo Tormiodose, which i think even Ken's Rage had.

Overall, it has some of the best gameplay in the spin off line up of RGG games, and is probably the only FOTNS game out there that's worth trying apart from like, the ps2 fighting game.