The ending of the first Hellblade is one of the most poignant and bittersweet endings I've ever experienced in a game. It is a thoughtful meditation on letting go of grief, accepting things as they are, but with a hopeful tinge rather than a nihilistic one. It's an ending I've rewatched many, many times, just to appreciate it again - and how the game's many, many cool elements intertwine to make it special. It was an ending that made me think; as excited as I'd be for a sequel, this is also a story that I'd be happy to leave alone. It peaks beautifully as a standalone experience, and it says more about its central character and core themes than a sequel could ever hope to build upon.

The story of Hellblade 2 is not bad. It doesn't derail or in any meaningful way compromise the story of the first game or the character of Senua. But the whole way through, I kept asking myself 'what exactly was the need for this?' 'What point so sorely needed to be made that they absolutely had to revisit this character who we left on such a perfect note?' As the end credits roll and I sit here writing this; I don't think I've gotten an answer. This feels like something from the 360 generation, when a smash hit game gets a rushed out sequel that just inoffensively iterates on the original -- except this is not that. There is seven years and a console generation between these games.

To that end; the mechanics of actually playing this game are similarly unremarkable - and even calling them 'iterative' would be generous because they sincerely do not iterate in any meaningful way over the last game. As someone who likes this style of game (and loves the original!), I hope it's obvious that I do not hate short games, nor narrative focused linear games. But after all this time, to get a game that feels so painfully un-interactive EVEN RELATIVE to the first game is honestly confounding to me. You spend so much time walking in a straight line; with the gorgeously rendered environments barley having a sliver of optional track to inspect or explore. In particular the opening act serves as a terrible introduction as you are even blocked in by literal, old school invisible walls. When it does come time to actually, ya know, play the game in some respect; it is the same painfully dull combat as the last game. While the incredibly visceral, vivid audio/video presentation makes the combat feel gnarly, it is the exact same type of encounter we all got bored of before credits rolled in Hellblade 1. And that goes double, no, TRIPLE for the puzzles! There are some interesting ideas here, but there's also a tonne of slowly walking around spaces to align items in the world to create a symbol, which again; we were all bored off long before the first game was even half-over.

Beautiful soundtrack and envelope-pushing visuals* aside; this is one of my biggest disappointments in many, many years.

An additional note on the graphics; on Series S there is a lot of very noticeable fuzz around some surfaces and on some effects. I can best describe it as that sorta-FSR fuzz (although I don't know what actual tech is being used here, you know what I mean) on clouds and shadows. It is mostly ignorable and the game overall does look incredible, but in some key scenes it felt like the Little Console That Could was buckling a little bit.

I have played a ton of games in my time that have stuck in my mind as something special, but nothing has ever stayed in their like Celeste. I can't help but be drawn into it's world and themes and story and gameplay and music and just fall in love with it all. Speaking as someone who goes through a lot, be it my dysphoria, or my depression, its nice having a game that I can just personally relate to in every single aspect. I like its message too on overcoming your mental health, even if it seems like an impossible climb. The way this feeds into the game with it actively encouraging you to keep pressing forward, and to be proud of your death count, it hits home. This game is truthfully my favorite game of all time and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I'll be coming back to it till the end of time.

bethesda managed to take their prowess at making vast and fun to explore maps with cool details spreaded throughout, the one thing most people remember their games from, and sacrificed it in order to expand their scope by the thousands to make a space game. i kinda thought this would happen before the game released; it's just hard to make barren, unhabited planets fun to interact with. even then, i hoped the game had enough setpieces and an engaging enough gameplay loop to keep things chugging along. that wasn't the case.

starfield feels like a mishmash of ideas that, upon implementation, couldn't converge in a cohesive way that would also make for a fun and engaging videogame. the tired-and-true bethesda gameplay loop of entering a base, killing enemies, looting then selling just becomes tired, both by tedium as well as by being limited by the game's myriad of systems that clash upon each other unharmoniously. places to loot feel cluttered, forcing you to use detective vision (or whatever it's called ingame. scanner?) to sort out whatever's useful. you can't loot too much because you run out of oxygen while running otherwise. you can't bring too much with you on your ship because of limited cargo space. both of those problems can be solved with perks and money, but even if you, you can't sell all of your stuff to vendors anyway because they have limited credits to buy your stuff.

intergalactic travel is done mainly through grav jumping from one solar system to another, where you can access its many planets. while you can pilot your ship manually, there's very little reason to do so since you can't really land on a planet by yourself. at most you can end up on some fights with pirate spaceships, but these are far and few between (i only had to deal with three space fights in the main story, one of them being in the tutorial). instead, most of the actual travel is done through fast traveling from the menu: fast travel to a solar system, fast travel to a planet's landing area, fast travel back to your base. it's baffling, it feels like the game has zero connective tissue between its planets, despite these same planets being almost all connective tissue upon its surface. only once did i feel thrilled to get a distress call from a base after landing on a new solar system only to find out it was part of the main story and not an unscripted event.

the main story is pretty bland, as well as having some filler that really doesn't compare narratively to bethesda's previous narratives. one particular main story mission felt like a low tier fallout 3 side quest, and i almost laughed at how out of place it felt (it comes up again during the final mission too! imagine that!). the game sets up an interesting mystery as the foundation for its storyline, then adds another mystery on top, then ends up solving one and a half of them. that narrative blueball feels disappointing, and not in a "not all questions need to be answered" kind of way. it felt cheap, and like they didn't really know what to do with it. admittedly i didn't do many side quests where apparently some of the real good writing is, but likewise i never felt prompted to do them in the first place.

now you might be reading this review and think "that's just a bethesda game, what did you expect?". while we both can't deny that, i would at least expect bethesda game studios to keep their previous improvements from past games. no city maps? having to add food to your inventory to eat it? no FOV slider or accessibility settings? that absolute atrocity that is the UI? NPCs that walk faster than you can walk but slower than you can run? i'm not gonna turn into cinemasins and nitpick every minor inconvenience, but they do add up.

in short, i'm having trouble coming up with someone who i can recommend this game to. it's too barren for classic bethesda fans and too basic for space game fans. it reached for the moon, but ended up as a failure to launch.

This game is heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild, and it's very blatant about it. But where Breath of the Wild hits a home run, Immortals strikes out. It fails to grasp a lot of what made Breath of the Wild so excellent, and ends up feeling somewhat dull and repetitive as a result.

But with that said, it's still kinda fun. Combat isn't terrible and expanding the skill trees is pretty interesting. Exploration is good because the world is pretty and there are some cool secrets to uncover.

All in all, this game is a bizarre crossover between Breath of the Wild, Kid Icarus, and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. At least the microtransactions are fair (just cosmetic stuff).

I haven't seen anybody mention this yet but the default control scheme in this game is downright atrocious. You pretty much have to remap buttons, but I haven't found a way to optimize it, since buttons almost always seem to overlap. Seriously, this game has to have the single worst default control scheme in a video game. I abandoned this because the controls are just that bad.