Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice was a game that I really enjoyed due to how unique the audiovisual design was. Yes it wasn't perfect, the combat and puzzles were especially tedious and really repetitive. Now 7 years later we finally got the long awaited sequel called Senua's Saga: Hellblade II and luckily the Devs said in a Developer Direct that they improved the biggest complaints which I've mentioned above. And they really had to improve the mechanics from the first game because Hellblade II being a sequel made it loses a lot of the uniqueness factor. So what did Ninja Theory improve exactly ? Tbh. almost nothing besides the beautiful graphics. The combat still consists out of the same four buttons prompts and the puzzles are also very similar. Sadly the puzzles are way easier than in Senua's Sacrifice and are almost no challenge. The only thing that they did change is the frequency of how often you have to engage in combat and solve puzzles. What did they replace it with? Yes walking. And when I say walking then I mean that there is a lot of walking. The first 40 minutes of the game are just walking and chapter 3 is basically just walking through a cave and lighting torches for an hour. This segment was just dragged out way too long and could have been a lot shorter. The voices inside Senua's head also weren't improved either, most of the time they are just a replacement for a UI where it tells you to look this way or to go that way. I just wished there was more to this feature besides that. The big selling point is obviously audio visual experience and yes the graphics are really beautiful. Same can be said about the smooth animations and the soundtrack. But besides that, that's about it. The story is less emotional captivating than one from the first game, I like that there are now side characters but unfortunately they were also pretty uninteresting.

Overall I can say that this is more of an art piece than a game and it can be really unpleasant to play for some people. I was also wondering what Ninja Theory did the whole time the last five - six years of development time. because the playtime is roughly five hours and these five hours you mostly walk around or watch cutscenes. There was also almost zero marketing which was weird because this is one of two big games for Microsoft this year. There might be two reasons for that, either they knew how short the game was and simply couldn't show more. Especially because there were two big "boss encounters" which were clearly the highlight of this game. The problem was that one of them was already spoilert with the announcement trailer 4 years ago. The other reason might be that Microsoft just simply didn't care and knew this game would flop. But it's also well known that Microsoft sucks at Marketing compared to Sony or Nintendo, so this wasn't a big surprise. If you look at the steam player count it peaked at roughly 4000 concurrent players which is bafflingly low. Yes this game is on gamepass which is where probably most of the players are coming from but that doesn't makes it better. I mean look at me for example, normally I prefer buying games, especially physical versions but I was already worried due to the lack of marketing and when I saw how short the games was I decided to play the game through Gamepass. I paid 1 € for one month but not just for Hellblade II, there are also 2 other games which I wanted to try, so I pretty much only paid ~ 0,34€. This worries me heavily after what happend to Tango Gameworks and Hi-Fi and I fear that Ninja Theory will be probably the next Studio on Microsoft's chopping block...sadly because you can clearly see how much passion the devs have. But I can't recommend playing this game throug gamepass and even less for ~50€ because gameplay-wise it's almost exactly the same as it's predecessor and a great example for a game with graphics over substance. This would have been better off as a tech demo to show off the powers of the Xbox console similar to what Sony did with Astro’s Playroom.The game ends so suddenly after teasing another big set piece(the third giant) that I can't stop feeling disappointed.

Games I finished in 2024 Ranked