Hellblade 2 is launch game for the Xbox Series released 3 and a half years too late. It has the spirit of 2013's Ryse Son of Rome; a technological marvel brought down by a short for the asking price, 5 hour runtime, bad pacing and mediocre gameplay.

The shine of its amazing graphics wears off when you realize most of the time you are pressing up on the control stick and going through a corridor. Fortunately the brain dead puzzles and repetitive combat bring some sort of variety.

You might think the story would save this expensive to develop, gorgeous mess but that hope is squandered by the overtly annoying voices yapping nonstop, the predictable finale with a mustache twirling villain and a bipolar story pace that goes slow as molasses at the start and rushes through its final act. At least Senua's stellar performance makes up for the rest of the milquetoast cast and the graphics impress showing what the Unreal Engine 5 can do over its predecessor.

The creators should stick to developing live action as its obvious fun and game mechanics are not a priority. The long development cycle just gave us Hellblade 1 with a worse story and a gorgeous coat of paint. It will not age well.

Hellblade 2 is a very weird game, not in the bad way mind you, it is just weird.
Very pretty game to look at, not as much fun to play, the puzzles are honestly boring and easy, there is no difficulty, you just go point A to point B and interact with something then go to point C until the puzzle ends, also the find a symbol puzzle is back, this one I kinda like. The combat is fine, sometimes the game even tricks you into thinking it is great, which is a plus in my book.
The narrative is fine, worst than the first game, the ending is bad, I do like the journey until we get there, but that last half an hour was honestly a mess.

A person's tolerance for Harold Halibut is going to depend on how much mileage they get out of slower games where inhabiting the space and conversations are the key focus, rather than anything resembling moment to moment gameplay.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't get on with that or think that any single approach is objectively better or worse, but I was drawn in by the game's beautiful handcrafted aesthetic and its hold on me never really faltered throughout the runtime. The ship you live on is full of memorable characters with their own unique idiosyncrasies, all helped along by a strong voice work - for Harold specifically there's a great balance between goofy ignorance and sentimentality, and that personality is probably one of the major factors that kept me going.

But I must emphasise again that this is a very slow game and there are quirks that come with that - sometimes your movement speed is slowed to a crawl as you'e made to follow another character, sometimes the dialogue goes on a little longer than expected, and this will put some people off. Thankfully for me, I used that time to take in the absolutely gorgeous world, animation and the small details dotted around all the locations you visit.

Baffling on every level, but compelling. Incredibly memorable. It feels like Yuji Naka wanted to make some sort of universal game language, something that could unite all cultures and religions, and decided "Banjo Kazooie designed by an alien" was the way to go.

This game is the opposite of Yooka Laylee. YL weaponized nostalgia to move copies of a mediocre game. Balan Wonderworld weaponizes nostalgia like a tactical nuke. Every design hallmark that has been established by over 30 years of platforming was completely ignored in the design of this game in favor of something opposing, or usually just orthogonal. Every instinct I've developed for these kind of games was wrong in a jarring and surreal way. It feels like a dream that's verging on nightmare but never quite getting there.

I respect it, I even like it, but it's too weird to actually recommend to anyone. But at the right price (about ten bucks) I think anyone curious should absolutely try it. There's nothing else like it.

Has a lot of heart and love for spongebob, with tons of easter eggs to early spongebob episodes, if you know your spongebob you will literally be going "oh my god they put the thing in the game" every 5 minutes. It is also very cool that a metroidvania set in bikini bottom exists, with iconic locations brought to life to be explored here.

Unfortunately thats where the good things end really, the story is bad, just a series of arbitrary fetch quests, the characters are bland at best and feel completely wrong at worst (if you are the type of insane person that gets pissed about bad characterisation of spongebob characters like me), the extremely simple gameplay is clunkier than you would expect, there are a few bad design decisions, and a ton ton ton of backtracking with not much new to make it less boring.

The positives are very novel and do make it an okay experience, I loved it as a kid and still enjoyed my first few hours with it this time, this would have been a positive review if the game was half its size, but as it stands playing this for 12 hours is gets fucking exhausting.