This is the worst "game" I've played in years

[Doctor Gitgud]

I am just going to hit these points machine-gun style in no particular order, but Hellblade 2 is a disaster and embodies most of what is wrong with current "AAA" games:

-Chromatic aberration outlines thick enough to blot out the sun

-Unreal Engine is loaded up so much that it fully tests the limits of my 4090 to render . . . rocks. That's right, all of Hellblade's budget went to graphics, but there was no artistic vision so every level consists entirely of rocks. Even the "forest" level has more rocks than vegetation.

-The facial expression modeling is impressive from a technical level, but that goes entirely to waste because its only purpose is to render a perpetual snarl on the protagonist's face. I imagine this was necessary because it's 2024, so we need a "strong woman" protagonist, and the best way to show that a woman is "strong" is by having her teeth show when she talks. Seriously, try to make the same facial expressions she does and see how ridiculous it feels. In fact, it's almost impossible to actually talk while baring one's teeth even if you try. And it becomes downright comical when she does it even during mundane conversations that shouldn't be emotionally charged.

-The combat system is a complete wreck. You have two moves, and most of the time it isn't even clear if what is happening on the screen is the result of your inputs, or if an in-battle cutscene has taken over. If the developers have any shame or self-awareness at all, they must be tremendously embarrassed that they couldn't figure out how to code a multi-targeting combat system, so the same few enemies attack you one-by-one (black ninja style) for the entire game and you just mash attack until they die. It is an absolute disgrace. I played on "normal" difficulty and literally never died.

-Midgame when a large, multi-story antagonist monster was introduced, I immediately realized that the developers had painted themselves into a corner because there was no way the combat system would accommodate anything other than one-on-one fights against extremely similar humanoid enemies. I was right, so the "epic boss fights" consist of running between pieces of cover to avoid environmental hazards that occur at set intervals.

-The rest of the "gameplay" consists of walking as slowly as humanly possible or walking slightly less slow. At first I thought the whole game felt like walking underwater. Later I discovered a stage where you actually *do* walk underwater and learned that it was possible to walk even more slowly than I previously thought. There are also the most banal environmental puzzles imaginable, and "interactive" cutscenes where you hold "up" to "struggle" against something, like climbing the ever-present rocks, or wiggling through a tunnel...of rocks.

-On that note, the developers are so clueless that they included those annoying sections where you have to slowly squeeze sideways through rocks, even though they are located in places where they clearly would not be necessary to mask a loading transition. That's right, the developers included this tropey and tedious data management masking tool "because it's something modern games have," even though it wasn't needed from a technical perspective.

-The writing is at least as bad as everything else. In the entire game, there is not *one single line* of dialogue that caused me to like or care about any of these characters. The shocking realization--the lesson learned--from the events that transpire here is that Senua is *not* her father and that her father and not her mother is the source of the "darkness" inside. This is something I thought was known before the game even started given that in in the original Hellblade, it is revealed that the father murdered the mother and abused Senua. And Hellblade 2 is even more heavy-handed, with the father appearing over and over as a shadowy figure to harass Senua with a satanic-sounding voice. So it comes across as extremely silly and trite for the big catharsis at the end to be something the player figured out a game and a half ago, and that Senua also seemed to understand at the end of the first game. The plot events are also thematically awkward and the story doesn't fit together. Obviously the writers were going for the same "unreliable narrator, maybe it all happened in her head, everything is open to interpretation" trope, but they completely botch it because the actions of other characters are inconsistent with that.

The TLDR of this is that Hellblade 2 is not worth exchanging "money" for in any form. If you have gamepass and want to flex your GPU, it might be worth your time as a tech demo. If you are going to *buy* a game, get Stellar Blade instead.

[patrick68794]

This was too ignorant to finish reading lol you're trying way too hard little fella

[Doctor Gitgud]

Point out one single inaccuracy or I'm going to just assume you're a troll.

[Zehke]

Just read the last section, my eyes went bleeding after the first few sentence, - and there is the "strong" women trope again - 4090? You know the purpose of a processor is to compute? Beside probably update drivers, my 4080 does not get to impressed by the game.
- Combat: more than two moves and it does its purpose to serve the narrative well. Yes it feels heavy, but this is what it should do...

I dont want to continue reading: Here goes another one - game that doesnt deserve any praise because some gamers did never realize games are art, therefor cannot deal with artistic games when they meet one.

This "This game is crap/**** or the worst" really gets on my nerves by now. Little attention span, obviously skipped art-classes, killed brain cells with games without to much substance, sums up every game in mind and build their "this is what a game should be" out of all of them: Result - unmeetable expectations especially for an informative game like hellblade.

This I guess sums the OPs perspective up quit well:
Instead of Hellblade 2 people should play Stellar blade. - This almost deserves a jester.

[ChickenMadness]

get woke go broke

[Foulcher]

Yes this is a walking simulator, did you read the description before purchasing ?

Environnements : that’s how Iceland is. But even with this I was amazed by the small details that made places unique.

Now I’m not a Hellblade fanboy, far from it, but I felt like the second game was at the same time less « elegant » than the first from an artistic point of view BUT also less painful. However some criticism are just « I purchased the game blindly ».

[Foulcher]

Originally posted by ChickenMadness:

get woke go broke

The game is not especially woke
Or not more than the first game (maybe less).
So they did not « get » woke.

[Offence]

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I am just going to hit these points machine-gun style in no particular order, but Hellblade 2 is a disaster and embodies most of what is wrong with current "AAA" games:

-Chromatic aberration outlines thick enough to blot out the sun

-Unreal Engine is loaded up so much that it fully tests the limits of my 4090 to render . . . rocks. That's right, all of Hellblade's budget went to graphics, but there was no artistic vision so every level consists entirely of rocks. Even the "forest" level has more rocks than vegetation.

-The facial expression modeling is impressive from a technical level, but that goes entirely to waste because its only purpose is to render a perpetual snarl on the protagonist's face. I imagine this was necessary because it's 2024, so we need a "strong woman" protagonist, and the best way to show that a woman is "strong" is by having her teeth show when she talks. Seriously, try to make the same facial expressions she does and see how ridiculous it feels. In fact, it's almost impossible to actually talk while baring one's teeth even if you try. And it becomes downright comical when she does it even during mundane conversations that shouldn't be emotionally charged.

-The combat system is a complete wreck. You have two moves, and most of the time it isn't even clear if what is happening on the screen is the result of your inputs, or if an in-battle cutscene has taken over. If the developers have any shame or self-awareness at all, they must be tremendously embarrassed that they couldn't figure out how to code a multi-targeting combat system, so the same few enemies attack you one-by-one (black ninja style) for the entire game and you just mash attack until they die. It is an absolute disgrace. I played on "normal" difficulty and literally never died.

-Midgame when a large, multi-story antagonist monster was introduced, I immediately realized that the developers had painted themselves into a corner because there was no way the combat system would accommodate anything other than one-on-one fights against extremely similar humanoid enemies. I was right, so the "epic boss fights" consist of running between pieces of cover to avoid environmental hazards that occur at set intervals.

-The rest of the "gameplay" consists of walking as slowly as humanly possible or walking slightly less slow. At first I thought the whole game felt like walking underwater. Later I discovered a stage where you actually *do* walk underwater and learned that it was possible to walk even more slowly than I previously thought. There are also the most banal environmental puzzles imaginable, and "interactive" cutscenes where you hold "up" to "struggle" against something, like climbing the ever-present rocks, or wiggling through a tunnel...of rocks.

-On that note, the developers are so clueless that they included those annoying sections where you have to slowly squeeze sideways through rocks, even though they are located in places where they clearly would not be necessary to mask a loading transition. That's right, the developers included this tropey and tedious data management masking tool "because it's something modern games have," even though it wasn't needed from a technical perspective.

-The writing is at least as bad as everything else. In the entire game, there is not *one single line* of dialogue that caused me to like or care about any of these characters. The shocking realization--the lesson learned--from the events that transpire here is that Senua is *not* her father and that her father and not her mother is the source of the "darkness" inside. This is something I thought was known before the game even started given that in in the original Hellblade, it is revealed that the father murdered the mother and abused Senua. And Hellblade 2 is even more heavy-handed, with the father appearing over and over as a shadowy figure to harass Senua with a satanic-sounding voice. So it comes across as extremely silly and trite for the big catharsis at the end to be something the player figured out a game and a half ago, and that Senua also seemed to understand at the end of the first game. The plot events are also thematically awkward and the story doesn't fit together. Obviously the writers were going for the same "unreliable narrator, maybe it all happened in her head, everything is open to interpretation" trope, but they completely botch it because the actions of other characters are inconsistent with that.

The TLDR of this is that Hellblade 2 is not worth exchanging "money" for in any form. If you have gamepass and want to flex your GPU, it might be worth your time as a tech demo. If you are going to *buy* a game, get Stellar Blade instead.

I consider this game a huge step back from the first one which I truly enjoyed but you can't recommend getting Stellar Blade on the steam forums since it's currently a SONY exclusive and not even ported on the PC.

[Foulcher]

Originally posted by -=🗲Offence🗲=-:

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I am just going to hit these points machine-gun style in no particular order, but Hellblade 2 is a disaster and embodies most of what is wrong with current "AAA" games:

-Chromatic aberration outlines thick enough to blot out the sun

-Unreal Engine is loaded up so much that it fully tests the limits of my 4090 to render . . . rocks. That's right, all of Hellblade's budget went to graphics, but there was no artistic vision so every level consists entirely of rocks. Even the "forest" level has more rocks than vegetation.

-The facial expression modeling is impressive from a technical level, but that goes entirely to waste because its only purpose is to render a perpetual snarl on the protagonist's face. I imagine this was necessary because it's 2024, so we need a "strong woman" protagonist, and the best way to show that a woman is "strong" is by having her teeth show when she talks. Seriously, try to make the same facial expressions she does and see how ridiculous it feels. In fact, it's almost impossible to actually talk while baring one's teeth even if you try. And it becomes downright comical when she does it even during mundane conversations that shouldn't be emotionally charged.

-The combat system is a complete wreck. You have two moves, and most of the time it isn't even clear if what is happening on the screen is the result of your inputs, or if an in-battle cutscene has taken over. If the developers have any shame or self-awareness at all, they must be tremendously embarrassed that they couldn't figure out how to code a multi-targeting combat system, so the same few enemies attack you one-by-one (black ninja style) for the entire game and you just mash attack until they die. It is an absolute disgrace. I played on "normal" difficulty and literally never died.

-Midgame when a large, multi-story antagonist monster was introduced, I immediately realized that the developers had painted themselves into a corner because there was no way the combat system would accommodate anything other than one-on-one fights against extremely similar humanoid enemies. I was right, so the "epic boss fights" consist of running between pieces of cover to avoid environmental hazards that occur at set intervals.

-The rest of the "gameplay" consists of walking as slowly as humanly possible or walking slightly less slow. At first I thought the whole game felt like walking underwater. Later I discovered a stage where you actually *do* walk underwater and learned that it was possible to walk even more slowly than I previously thought. There are also the most banal environmental puzzles imaginable, and "interactive" cutscenes where you hold "up" to "struggle" against something, like climbing the ever-present rocks, or wiggling through a tunnel...of rocks.

-On that note, the developers are so clueless that they included those annoying sections where you have to slowly squeeze sideways through rocks, even though they are located in places where they clearly would not be necessary to mask a loading transition. That's right, the developers included this tropey and tedious data management masking tool "because it's something modern games have," even though it wasn't needed from a technical perspective.

-The writing is at least as bad as everything else. In the entire game, there is not *one single line* of dialogue that caused me to like or care about any of these characters. The shocking realization--the lesson learned--from the events that transpire here is that Senua is *not* her father and that her father and not her mother is the source of the "darkness" inside. This is something I thought was known before the game even started given that in in the original Hellblade, it is revealed that the father murdered the mother and abused Senua. And Hellblade 2 is even more heavy-handed, with the father appearing over and over as a shadowy figure to harass Senua with a satanic-sounding voice. So it comes across as extremely silly and trite for the big catharsis at the end to be something the player figured out a game and a half ago, and that Senua also seemed to understand at the end of the first game. The plot events are also thematically awkward and the story doesn't fit together. Obviously the writers were going for the same "unreliable narrator, maybe it all happened in her head, everything is open to interpretation" trope, but they completely botch it because the actions of other characters are inconsistent with that.

The TLDR of this is that Hellblade 2 is not worth exchanging "money" for in any form. If you have gamepass and want to flex your GPU, it might be worth your time as a tech demo. If you are going to *buy* a game, get Stellar Blade instead.

I consider this game a huge step back from the first one which I truly enjoyed but you can't recommend getting Stellar Blade on the steam forums since it's currently a SONY exclusive and not even ported on the PC.

Did you play the first one recently ? I completed it just before and it was a pain to play.
Hellblade 2 pacing is far better

[Alezul]

"embodies most of what is wrong with current "AAA" games:"

So this game is broken on launch, always online, buggy mess with an ingame shop to buy skins?

Because that's what's wrong with current AAA games, not...facial expressions or whatever dumb reasons you have to hate this game.

[WakkaBlitzBallChamp]

Didn't read because I believe it's the same mumbo jumbo coming on daily basis. This game is not for you, move on.

[Demystificator]

Hellblade 2 is the worst game you played in years ?

I envy you, you avoided so much games until then.

[Offence]

Originally posted by Foulcher:

Originally posted by -=🗲Offence🗲=-:

I consider this game a huge step back from the first one which I truly enjoyed but you can't recommend getting Stellar Blade on the steam forums since it's currently a SONY exclusive and not even ported on the PC.

Did you play the first one recently ? I completed it just before and it was a pain to play.
Hellblade 2 pacing is far better

No , i played the first one when it launched and it was a blast and had waaaaay better flow and much more combat to boot compared to this one.

This game is just a tech demo with some of the easiest puzzles out there and by the end nothing happens. The last fight in Hellblade 1 was epic..

[WikiTora]

Accurate review. The first is better, too much exposition in this one, NPC weren't needed and combat is even more basic.

[Lord_Sabnock]

I loved it all. MY 4090 @ 5120x1440 on my HDR OLED Ultrawide Monitor made it absolutely glorious.

Story was fantastic

Audio was amazing

Combat wasn't the best but what there was was tense.

The puzzles were the weakest point for me. needed to be a lot complex.

I agree that the first was better and fresher though.

[Foulcher]

The first was too long for nothing.
They were right to shorten the tedious « « « puzzle » » » sections.
Ennemies were HP bags.

The story was too inner, no other NPCs etc. therefore it felt empty.