Senua's saga :hellblade 2

tbh what concerns me is that I read a few reviews suggesting the gameplay feels like a backwards step compared to the first - which I don’t think anyone would argue was a particularly mechanically robust game - and that the story is a lot more meandering and impersonal than the more intimate first. Some even suggest the audio and visual design is less clearly ‘motivated’ than the first. Even the most negative reviews though suggest the thing is a graphical powerhouse. But we’ll all find out how fair those criticisms / compliments are when we’ve played it.

It’s one of those games that really struggles from the off, as Hellblade was not a game that immediately cried out for a sequel, let alone being transformed into a ‘Saga’. It was a tight, contained and personal story that stood proudly on its own terms - not perfect, but a compelling formal experiment. Justifying a sequel was always going to be a tricky ask, and one the reviewers seem conflicted on whether it pulled off (some yes, some no). I’ll certainly give it a go on Game Pass but maybe once I’ve tidied off one or two other games I’ve been playing. But a short running time is undoubtedly welcome,

In some ways this game was of course the safest, most predictable route Ninja Theory could’ve gone - retreading familiar ground with a bigger budget, even if the first game was an admirable swing. But it sounds like they have original projects in the work too, so hopefully they aren’t victim to Microsoft’s current commercial ruthlessness and we get to see what else they have cooking.

To be fair, looking at the first Senua and just asking is it fun to play and does it run well would be doing the game itself a profound disservice.

The game has much bigger ambitions than that - whether it succeeds or fails or somewhere in between is up for discussion, but it deserves at least to be met on its own terms.

Opted to forge ahead with this since it's short. Now into chapter 5 (of six, I believe) and if anything my opinion of it has only soured further. The combat is, I'm sorry to say, atrocious. Every encounter makes me roll my eyes when another random enemy lunges at you from behind, until the arbitrary number you need to kill to proceed has been reached. It's kind of bizarre, because Ninja Theory have made much better than this in the past. I would never have considered Enslaved or DMC masterpieces of game or combat design, but they're on a different level compared to this.

The story is rambling and uninteresting - there doesn't seem to be much in the way of coherent stakes or motivations, and it actively undermines some of the intriguing stuff about the last game. I've only been playing one chapter per session, but the game feels much, much longer than the five hours I've put into it because there's so much fluff and filler in even a game this modestly scoped.

At least the last stretch of chapter 4 was a solid spectacle, even if again there wasn't much in the way of gameplay to grasp onto. Other than that, this is proving a rather frustrating creative fumble from Ninja Theory - a sequel that is a step back from its predecessor in every conceivable way other than graphical presentation.

Having finished the game, I very much get what it's trying to do thematically. But if it's a poem, it's for me a bad poem: full of confused theming, trite imagery and several aesthetic missteps.

There's nothing the game does that the first game didn't do substantially better: that's also about trauma, but more personal and intimate. This awkwardly tries to revisit some of those themes with a more epic scope story, but loses focus and purpose in the process. It belatedly settles on being a story about confronting your past (or not) and forging one's own destiny, but these are very well-trodden themes that this struggles to say anything refreshing about. It also tries to explain away some of the phenomenon seen throughout the game, but given the addition of multiple other characters throughout it actually just confuses things further IMO and renders a lot of the journey confused and arbirtray. The fighting seemed less a desperate, urgent fight for survival for me than waiting for the designers to arbitrarily decide how many enemies you had to fight in this particular encounter. I definitely get what the former is what they were going for, but it didn't work at all for me.

I also think one of the biggest error the game makes is committing to the 'one shot' gimmick popularised by God of War. I think this really hurts the game in fundamental ways - it makes the pacing ponderous and sluggish, while also losing the impact that cuts and shifts in perspective would allow.That it relies so much on clichéd video game imagery - such as the fantasy / dream sequences and the 'let the neon dots tell you a story' walking sequences - hurts it a lot as well.

Don't get me wrong: if the game worked for you and moved you, that's fantastic. That's what art should do. No reading or reaction is right or wrong. But for me the game was a collossal disappointment - learning all the wrong lessons from Ninja Theory's first Hellblade game, and making a substantially lesser sequel as a result.