The original Hellblade is the game that first made me subscribe to Gamepass for a month, a whole £1 to replay a game I’d already completed on the PlayStation 4, a game I’ve partially replayed on PlayStation 5 with the Pulse 3D headset… something that everybody should do to really understand what Senua was going through as regards hearing voices.

The sequel has been a long time coming, and from reports is a shorter experience than the original… which may cause some people concern given that the original was a fairly short story to begin with… but it’s finally released, and being a full blown Gamepass subscriber now, it’s free to play.

July 2^nd

So… I completed this around 4 weeks ago, but thanks to a horrendous episode of Pneumonia, with a side serving of Covid, my concentration levels have been a mess the last few weeks and I’ve only just gotten around to feeling ready to write about it.

In short… it was a massive disappointment.

While it works as a wonderful demonstration of the power of the Unreal 5 engine… as a game it’s lacking so much… weak combat, with what felt like a severe amount of lag whenever you try to parry, and a level of puzzles that was frankly embarrassing… it’s a 5/10 or a solid 6/10 if you liked the original.

It looks incredible, the level of detail and the lighting is stunning… with no cuts (a la God of War) and some passable boss fights (aside from the last one) it stands out from the crowd… but the passages between combat encounters are all rather lifeless.

I don’t consider a walk from one place to another listening to another characters story to be riveting gameplay, and the collectibles are rather bland (but offer the best the game comes to explaining lore and tales from the land you’re roaming) and there is little outside that.

The boss battles tend to follow a pattern, run from one place of cover to the next (in the first shielding from fireballs, the second huge waves) as you strive to reach the person you seek to end the encounter.

It’s all incredibly dull.

Puzzle wise it’s basic, which switch to throw to move the landscape to allow passage to the next item you need to complete a collection, or wandering around an area to find the exact piece of architecture to line up to form a symbol… and it never strays from these simple wanderfests to anything more complicated.

It’s a shame, the first game craps all over this big time, and that had considerably less time and resources spent to create it… the characters are fine, the lore fine… but the combat and the majority of the gameplay is so dull… if they can find a good mix of the two games for the inevitable 3^rd Senua title, then it has potential to be a truly next gen experience… which is what you were probably expecting from this one.A